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IN  COMMEMORATION  OF  THE  WORK  OF 

THE  EIGHT  THOUSAND  YALE  MEN 

WHO  TOOK  PART  IN  THE  WORLD  WAR 

1914-1918 


HOW  AMERICA  WENT  TO  WAR 

THE  GIANT  HAND 

THE  ROAD  TO  FRANCE  I. 

THE  ROAD  TO  FRANCE  II. 

THE  ARMIES  OF  INDUSTRY  I. 

THE  ARMIES  OF  INDUSTRY  II. 

DEMOBILIZATION 


HOW  AMERICA  WENT 
TO  WAR 

AN  ACCOUNT  FROM  OFFICIAL  SOURCES  OF 
THE  NATION'S  WAR  ACTIVITIES 

1917-1920 


SV-i/f/i^^^^^c^  .^yl^'U^^€^^tJ^^6ve/^^e^^<:^/^^^^  tyiUzCC' 


,yA/>frv^, 


DEMOBILIZATION 

OUR  INDUSTRIAL  AND  MILITARY 
DEMOBILIZATION  AFTER  THE  ARMISTICE 

1918-1920 


BY  BENEDICT  CROWELL 

THE  ASSISTANT  SECRETARY  OF  WAR  AND 
DIRECTOR  OF  MUNITIONS  1917-1920 

AND  ROBERT  FORREST  WILSON 

FORMERLY  CAPTAIN,  UNITED  STATES  ARMY 

ILLUSTRATED  WITH  PHOTOGRAPHS  FROM  THE 
COLLECTIONS  OF  THE  WAR  AND  NAVY  DEPARTMENTS 


NEW  HAVEN 

YALE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

LONDON  •  HUMPHREY  MILFORD  •  OXFORD  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

MDCCCCXXI 


Copyright,  1921,  by 
Yale  University  Press 


CONTENTS 


Chapter 

Page 

I. 

Halt! 1 

II. 

The  A.  E.  F.  Embarks 

9 

III. 

The  Transatlantic  Ferry 

30 

IV. 

Ebb  Tide 

47 

V. 

The  Process  of  Discharging  Soldiers 

62 

VI. 

Picking  Up  after  the  Army     . 

74 

VII. 

Soldier  Welfare    .... 

92 

VIII. 

War  Contracts      .... 

112 

IX. 

The  Settlement  of  the  War  Contracts 

126 

X. 

Ordnance  Demobilization 

145 

XI. 

Artillery       ..... 

163 

XII. 

Ammunition  and  Other  Ordnance     . 

181 

XIII. 

Aircraft        ..... 

199 

XIV. 

Technical  Supplies 

214 

XV. 

Quartermaster  Supplies 

234 

XVI. 

Buildings  and  Lands 

256 

XVII. 

Selling  the  Surplus 

269 

XVIII. 

The  Foreign  Liquidation 

287 

XIX. 

Index 

The  Balance  Sheet 

315 
323 

ILLUSTRATIONS 


Armistice  Day  at  Independence  Hall 
The  Last  Shot    ..... 
The  Armistice  at  a  Munitions  Factory 
Victory        .... 
Reconstruction     . 
Camp  Street  in  Le  Mans  Area 
Bath  House  at  Brest  . 
In  Camp  Pontanezen 
Company  Street  in  Pontanezen 

1.  Entering  "Mill"  at  Bordeaux 

2.  Receiving  Clean  Clothing  in  "Mill"     . 

3.  The   "Mill"   Barbershop 

4.  Through  "Mill"  and  Ready  for  Home 
Kitchens  at  Le  Mans  .... 
Street  in  Le  Mans  Area  No.  5     . 
Casuals  on  Transport  Leaving  Brest 
Boarding  Transport  from  Lighters,  Brest  . 
Troops  on  Battleship  Ready  for  Mess 
Warships  with  Troops  Docking  at  Hoboken 
Embarking  for  United  States 
Mess  Room  on  Converted  Cargo  Transport  Ohioan 
Sailing  Day  at  St.  Nazaire 
Transport  Maui  Loading  at  St.  Nazaire 
Souvenirs  of  His  Service   . 
Embarking  at  St.  Nazaire  . 
Casuals  Waiting  to  Board  Ship  at  St.  Nazaire 
Boarding  Edward  Luckenbach 
Embarkation  at  Bordeaux  . 
Left  Behind 
Home  Again 

Welcoming  Returning  Troops  at  Hoboken 
First  Division  Parading  on  Pennsylvania  Ave 
Victory  Arch  in  Washington 
Overseas  Troops  Entraining  at  Hoboken 
Veterans  Detraining  at  Camp  Sherman 
Discharged  Soldiers  Receiving  Final  Pay 
Making  Out  Discharge  Certificates     . 
Common  Grave  near  Cirey 
Lost  Military  Baggage  at  Hoboken  . 
Preparing  Cemetery  at  Beaumont 
Loading  Coffins  on  Collection  Trucks 


Frontispiece 

Opposite  page    4 

4 

5 

5 

12 

12 

13 

13 

22 

22 

"    23 

23 

30 

30 

31 

31 

"    36 

"    36 

37 

37 

42 

42 

43 

43 

"   54 

"   54 

"   55 

"   55 

"        60 

"   60 

61 

"   61 

"   66 

"   66 

"   67 

"   67 

"   78 

"   78 

79 

79 

ILLUSTRATIONS 


1.  Overflowed  Cemetery  at  Fleville 

2.  Two  Months  Later — Bodies  All  Removed   . 

1.  Romagne  Cemetery,  April    lo,   1919 

2.  Romagne   Cemetery,   May   30,    1919 
Portrait  of  Colonel  Ira  L.  Reeves 
Students  at  Beaune  University   .... 
Art  Students  in  A.  E.  F.  Training  Center,  Paris 
A.  E.  F.  Students  in  University  of  Lyon     . 
Air  View  of  Pershing  Stadium,  Paris 
American  Soldiers  at  University  of  Grenoble     . 
A.  E.  F.  Soldiers  as  Comedians  .... 
Judging  Comedy  Horse  at  4th  Army  Horse  Show 
Disabled   Veterans   Taking   Federal  Training 
Editorial  Conference  of  Stars  and  Stripes  . 
Poster   Used    in   Reemployment   Campaign 
Employment  Office  at  Camp  Sherman 
Sending  Out  the  Stars  and  Stripes     . 
Graduate  A.  E.  F.  Students  at  Edinburgh  University 
Review  of  "Pershing's  Own  Regiment"  at  Coblenz 
Games  in  Le  Mans  Embarkation  Area 
Portrait  of  War  Department  Claims  Board 
Convalescent  Reading  Stars  and  Stripes 
Hospital  Train  in  United  States 
Havoc  Wrought  by  German  Guns  at  Fort  near  Rheims 
"Wipers"  Ready  for  Tourists 

French  and  German  Airplane  Engines  after  Combat 
Ruined  Tanks  near  Cambrai 
American  Field  Guns  on  the  Rhine   . 
American  Gun  on  Ehrenbreitstein,  Coblenz 
Destroying  Captured  German  Ammunition 
A  Captured  Ammunition  Dump 
Preparing  Liberty  Engines  for  Storage 
Assembling  Plant  at  Romorantin 
Flying  Field  at  Issoudun   . 
Lame   Ducks        .... 
American   Airplane   Wreckage    . 
Fuel  for  the  Bonfire 
German  Locomotive  Taken  Over  by  A.  E.  F.  Engineers 
Engineers  Constructing  Beaune  University 
Air  View  of  A.  E.  F.  Ordnance  Docks 
A  Gas  Demonstration  ..... 

Motor  Transport  in  France       .... 
Part  of  A.  E.  F.'s  Surplus  Motor  Equipment   . 
A.  E.  F.  Supply  Train  on  Way  to  Ration  Dump 
A.  E.  F.  Flour  on  Way  to  Starving  Austria 
A.  E.  F.  Horses  to  be  Sold         .... 
Storage  Warehouses  at  Jeflersonville  Depot 
West  Indian  Laborers  Embarking  for  Home 


Opposite  page    86 
86 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


View  of  Camp  Sherman     .... 
In  an  Army  Retail  Store   .... 
Customers  at  Opening  of  Army  Retail  Store 
Wreck  of  Coal  Mine  at  Lens   . 
Motor  Transport  Salvage  in  France  . 
Portrait  of  Interallied   Purchasers 


Opposite  page 


XI 

268 
269 
269 
310 
3«o 

an 


ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

The  authors  acknowledge  their  indebtedness  to  Major  Robert 
H.  Fletcher,  Jr.,  General  Staff,  who  collected  from  the  various 
war  department  bureaus  concerned  most  of  the  material  on 
which  this  book  is  based.  Also  their  thanks  are  due  to  the 
numerous  former  and  present  officials  of  the  War  Department 
and  officers  of  the  Army  who  read  the  manuscript  and  criticized 
it  constructively. 

B.  C.  &  R.  F.  W. 
Washington,  D.  C, 
September,  ip2i. 


DEMOBILIZATION 


CHAPTER  I 
HALT! 

AT  a  few  minutes  past  ten  o'clock  of  the  morning  of  No- 

/-\  vember  ii,  1918,  the  Secretary  of  War  in  Washing- 
JL  M.  ton  received  from  General  Pershing  a  communication 
informing  the  Government  that  eleven  o'clock  a.m.  that  day, 
French  time,  an  armistice  with  Germany  had  gone  into  effect. 
No  message  more  momentous  had  ever  come  to  the  American 
War  Department.  The  World  War  was  at  an  end.  It  was 
peace.  It  was  victory. 

Over  there  on  that  American  front  which  had  penetrated 
the  supposedly  impregnable  Argonne  and  now  commanded 
the  enemy's  main  line  of  communications  at  Sedan,  boys  in 
our  own  khaki  wriggled,  charged,  fought,  plunged  ahead  all 
the  morning,  like  the  players  of  some  mighty  football  team 
gaining  every  inch  of  advance  possible  before  an  intermission ; 
and  finally,  as  the  whistles  shrilled  and  the  great  silence  fell 
at  last  upon  a  theatre  that  had  shaken  and  roared  with  the 
thunder  of  war  for  more  than  four  years,  they  set  their  heels 
into  the  turf  of  a  line  that  was  to  be  held  as  a  starting-off  place 
if  the  armistice,  too,  should  prove  to  be  only  an  intermission 
and  a  period  of  recuperation. 

Behind  these  outpost  men  were  the  American  Expeditionary 
Forces,  two  million  strong.  Behind  the  A.  E.  F.  in  America 
was  a  training  and  maintenance  army  nearly  as  numerous. 

Behind  the  uniformed  and  organized  Army  as  it  existed 
on  the  eleventh  day  of  November  was  another  force  of  a 
quarter  of  a  million  men,  technically  under  arms.  These  were 
Selective  Service  men,  drafted  men,  entraining  that  day  and 
adding  themselves  to  the  human  flood  sweeping  on  toward 
Germany.  In  number  this  force  alone  was  larger  than  any 


2  DEMOBILIZATION 

ever  previously  enrolled  at  one  time  in  the  American  military 
service,  except  the  forces  called  to  the  colors  during  the  Civil 
War;  yet  so  expanded  had  become  our  values  that  they 
attracted  only  passing  attention  in  the  midst  of  larger  war 
activities.  These  inductives  were  one  more  increment — that 
was  all. 

And  behind  the  Army  itself  were  twenty-five  million  Ameri- 
can men  between  the  ages  of  eighteen  and  forty-five,  registered, 
classified,  and  numbered  in  the  order  in  which  they  too  in  turn 
should  join  the  current  that  led,  if  necessary,  to  the  supreme 
sacrifice. 

The  foundation  on  which  rested  this  human  edifice  was 
industrial.  Nothing  less  than  the  whole  of  America's  material 
resources  had  been  pledged  to  the  end  of  victory.  The  whole 
of  America's  resources!  How  inadequately  could  pigmy  man 
realize  their  might  before  he  took  them  all  and  formed  and 
molded  them  into  one  single-purpose  machine !  That  machine 
was  born  in  travail  that  broke  men's  bodies  and  reputations, 
that  threw  down  the  mighty  from  their  seats  and  exalted  those 
of  low  degree,  that  moved  inexorably  but  surely.  And  when 
the  machine  was  built  it  released  forces  terrifying  even  to  men 
accustomed  to  administering  the  greatest  of  human  activities, 
forces  well-nigh  ungovernable. 

It  took  seven  million  workers,  men  and  women,  to  operate 
the  war  industrial  machine — seven  million  Americans  delving 
in  the  earth  for  ores,  chemicals,  and  fuels,  felling  the  forests, 
quarrying  the  rocks,  carrying  the  raw  materials  to  the  mills, 
tending  the  fires  and  the  furnaces,  operating  the  cranes,  guid- 
ing the  finishing  machinery  with  a  precision  never  before  de- 
manded, slaughtering  the  beeves,  curing  the  meat,  packing 
the  vegetables,  weaving  the  fabrics,  fashioning  the  garments, 
transporting  all,  and  accomplishing  the  million  separate  tasks 
necessary  to  the  munitioning  of  the  Army. 

And  as  a  background  to  all  this,  behind  both  the  military 
and  the  industrial  armies,  was  another  force,  perhaps  the 
greatest  force  of  all — the  will  of  the  people  themselves,  of 
one  hundred  million  Americans  who,  without  the  coercion  and 


HALT!  3 

duress  of  law  and  as  a  purely  voluntary  act,  denied  their  appe- 
tites, their  pleasures,  and  their  vanities,  contributed  their 
utmost  to  the  war  finances,  made  war  gardens  to  add  to  the 
food  supply,  produced  millions  of  articles  for  the  comfort  of 
the  soldiers  both  well  and  wounded,  and  in  one  way  or  another 
put  forth  effort  that  did  not  flag  until  victory  came. 

Such  was  America  in  a  war  that  truly  threatened  her  exist- 
ence— America  invincible. 

The  armistice  put  an  end  to  all  this  enterprise  and  effort. 
It  did  more — the  armistice  was  a  command  to  the  Government 
to  scrap  the  war  machine  and  restore  its  parts  to  the  peaceful 
order  in  which  they  had  been  found.  In  military  law,  an  armi- 
stice denotes  the  temporary  cessation  of  hostilities;  but  the 
armistice  of  1918  was  a  finality.  Its  terms  destroyed  the  Ger- 
man military  power.  Those  in  authority,  aware  that  the  armi- 
stice was  to  be  no  period  of  waiting  with  collected  forces  for 
the  outcome  of  negotiations,  did  not  pause  even  to  survey  the 
magnitude  of  the  thing  they  had  built:  they  turned  imme- 
diately to  the  task  of  dismantling  it.  Some  of  the  processes  of 
demobilization  began  before  the  guns  ceased  to  fire.  Five  days 
before  the  armistice  the  A.  E.  F.  canceled  many  of  the  for- 
eign orders  for  important  supplies.  On  November  1  we 
stopped  sending  combatant  troops  to  France.  In  late  October 
the  Ordnance  Department  created  an  organization  for  de- 
mobilizing war  industry. 

However,  before  the  machine  could  be  knocked  down  and 
its  parts  distributed,  it  had  to  be  stopped.  There  are  two  ways 
of  stopping  the  limited  express.  One  is  to  throw  a  switch 
ahead  of  it — effective,  but  disastrous  to  the  train.  The  other 
way  is  to  put  on  the  brakes. 

The  war-industry  machine  had  attained  a  momentum  almost 
beyond  mundane  comparisons.  Slow  in  gaining  headway,  like 
any  other  great  mass,  as  thousands  added  their  brains  and  their 
muscles  to  its  progress  it  gathered  speed  until,  at  the  first  day 
of  the  armistice,  it  was  nearing  the  point  at  which  it  could 
consume  the  material  resources  and  turn  them  out  as  finished 
war  products  up  to  the  capacity  of  American  mechanical  skill 


4  DEMOBILIZATION 

and  machinery  to  handle  them.  It  had  not  quite  reached  that 
point.  Many  of  the  vital  but  easily  manufactured  supplies  had 
long  since  reached  the  pinnacles  of  their  production  curves, 
but  some  of  the  more  difficult  ones  were  not  yet  in  full  manu- 
facture. On  Armistice  Day,  however,  the  industry  was  not  more 
than  six  months  away  from  the  planned  limit  of  its  fecundity. 

For  the  administration  of  the  industrial  enterprise  the  task 
ahead  was  first  to  bring  that  momentum  to  a  halt  and  then  to 
break  up  the  machine.  The  easiest  way  was  to  throw  a  switch 
ahead  of  it — in  other  words,  to  issue  a  blanket  stop-order  on 
all  military  manufacturing  projects.  But  to  have  done  that 
would  have  been  to  court  consequences  as  disastrous  as  those 
of  war  itself.  Business  and  industry  would  have  fallen  into 
chaos  and  the  country  would  have  been  filled  with  jobless 
men.  The  other  way,  the  way  chosen,  was  to  apply  the  brakes 
to  the  thousands  of  wheels. 

The  magnitude  of  the  task  ahead  was  appalling.  The  liqui- 
dation of  the  war  industry  was  seen  to  be  a  matter  as  complex, 
as  intricate,  as  full  of  the  possibilities  of  error  and  failure  as 
the  mobilization  itself.  In  only  one  respect  did  demobilization 
begin  with  an  advantage:  there  was  at  hand  an  organization, 
the  organization  which  had  administered  the  creation  of  the 
Army  and  the  manufacture  of  its  supplies,  ready  to  be  turned 
into  a  wrecking  crew. 

Balanced  against  this  situation  was  the  countering  fact 
that  the  men  of  this  organization  were  war  weary.  Ahead  of 
them  were  none  of  the  conspicuous  rewards  that  follow  con- 
spicuous war  service.  The  nation  does  not  award  medals  and 
other  honors  to  those  who  restore  the  conditions  of  peace.  The 
people  themselves  were  satiated  with  war  and  desired  nothing 
so  much  as  a  space  in  which  they  could  forget  battles  and  cam- 
paigns. At  best,  demobilization  was  to  be  a  thankless  job. 
Moreover,  many  of  the  executives,  particularly  those  in  the 
industrial  organization,  were  men  of  large  personal  affairs, 
serving  their  country  at  a  sacrifice.  For  the  most  part  they  were 
disheartened  men,  denied  the  satisfaction  of  seeing  the  full 
fruition  of  their  plans  have  its  effect  against  a  hateful  enemy. 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 


THE  LAST  SHOT 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

THE  ARMISTICE  AT  A  MUNITIONS  FACTORY 


HALT !  5 

Every  interest  of  personal  gain  called  to  them  after  the  armi- 
stice to  desert  their  official  posts  and  return  to  the  satisfactions 
of  private  endeavor,  and  only  the  righteous  sense  of  their  duty 
to  the  nation  held  them  in  the  organization. 

It  was  necessary  for  the  organization  not  only  to  remain 
intact,  but  to  speed  the  activities  of  demobilization  as  it  had 
sped  those  of  mobilization.  The  pre-armistice  spirit  had  in 
some  way  to  be  maintained.  On  November  1 1  the  war  was 
costing  the  United  States  about  $50,000,000  a  day.  Every 
day  of  indecision  in  adopting  the  plan  of  demobilization  and 
every  day's  delay  in  carrying  out  the  plan  added  tremendously 
to  the  burden  of  taxation  that  would  rest  upon  the  nation  for 
generations  to  come. 

Demobilization  meant,  first  of  all,  the  disbanding  of  the 
American  Army.  Whatever  economic  considerations  might 
graduate  the  termination  of  war  industry,  no  such  considera- 
tions were  to  be  permitted  to  retard  the  homeward  progress  of 
the  troops.  Four  million  American  homes  demanded  their  men 
at  once ;  and  whether  the  immediate  return  of  the  troops  meant 
unemployment  and  distress  or  not,  the  Government  was  deter- 
mined to  comply  with  the  demand. 

The  creation  of  the  Army  and  its  movement  toward  France 
had  involved  the  rail  transportation  of  about  8,000,000  sol- 
diers in  special  cars  and  trains.  The  home  movement  would 
require  an  operation  almost  as  great.  Of  the  2,000,000  men  of 
the  American  Expeditionary  Forces,  more  than  half  had 
crossed  the  ocean  in  foreign  ships,  all  of  which,  of  course,  were 
withdrawn  from  our  service  immediately  after  the  armistice. 
The  unbroken  eastward  transatlantic  procession  of  troopships 
had  continued  for  about  fourteen  months.  On  the  first  day  of 
the  armistice  the  transatlantic  ferrying  capacity  of  the 
American-flag  troopships  was  not  much  in  excess  of  100,000 
men  a  month.  Moreover,  practically  all  our  troop  transports 
had  reached  the  point  of  having  to  be  laid  up  for  recondition- 
ing. Assuming,  however,  that  they  could  be  kept  in  continuous 
operation,  they  could  not  bring  back  to  America  more  than 
two-thirds  of  the  troops  in  the  time  it  had  taken  the  whole 


6  DEMOBILIZATION 

A.  E.  F.  to  cross  to  France.  Yet  the  problem  of  demobilization 
was  to  repatriate  the  A.  E.  F.  in  that  time  at  most. 

Demobilization  involved  a  final  cash  settlement  with  every 
one  of  the  four  million  men  under  arms;  computations  of  back 
pay,  complicated  as  they  were  with  allotments  and  payments 
for  government  war  bonds  and  the  war  risk  insurance;  and, 
finally,  the  payment  to  each  soldier  of  the  sixty-dollar  bonus 
voted  by  the  Congress.  Demobilization  also  included  the  care 
of  the  wounded  for  many  months  after  the  fighting  ceased, 
their  physical  and  mental  reconstruction,  and  their  reeduca- 
tion to  enable  them  to  take  useful  places  in  the  world. 

On  the  industrial  side  demobilization  was  the  liquidation 
of  a  business  whose  commitments  had  reached  the  staggering 
total  of  $35,000,000,000.  Demobilization  meant  taking  prac- 
tically the  entire  industrial  structure  of  the  United  States, 
which  had  become  one  vast  munitions  plant,  and  converting 
it  again  into  an  instrumentality  for  producing  the  commodities 
of  peaceful  commerce.  This  without  stopping  an  essential 
wheel,  and  also  in  the  briefest  possible  time,  for  the  world  was 
in  sore  need  of  these  products.  Efficient  demobilization,  it 
follows,  would  permit  the  7,000,000  industrial  war  workers  to 
turn  without  a  break  in  employment  from  the  production  of 
war  supplies  to  that  of  peace  supplies. 

At  the  base  of  modem  business  stability  lies  the  inviolabil- 
ity of  contracts.  He  who  breaches  a  contract  must  expect  to 
pay  indemnity,  and  the  Government  cannot  except  itself  from 
this  rule.  Demobilization  meant  the  suspension  and  termina- 
tion of  war  contracts  running  into  billions  in  value,  many  of 
them  without  a  scrap  of  paper  to  show  as  a  written  instru- 
ment; it  meant  termination  without  laying  the  Government 
open  to  the  payment  of  damages,  and  therefore  it  implied  the 
honorable  adjustment  of  the  claims  of  the  contractors. 

One  of  the  conditions  on  which  complete  demobilization 
depended  was  the  adoption  of  a  future  military  policy  for  the 
United  States.  But  this  was  in  the  hands,  not  of  the  military 
organization,  but  of  Congress.  The  whole  program,  therefore, 
could  not  be  put  through  until  Congress  had  acted.  After  the 


HALT I  7 

policy  was  defined,  then  it  became  the  duty  of  the  demobiliza- 
tion forces  to  choose  and  store  safely  the  reserve  equipment 
for  the  permanent  establishment  and  for  the  field  use  of  a 
possible  future  combatant  force  until  another  war  industry 
could  be  brought  into  existence. 

When  that  had  been  done  there  would  remain  a  surplus  of 
military  property.  It  thereupon  became  the  function  of  de- 
mobilization to  dispose  of  this  property  through  a  sales  organi- 
zation that  would  have  in  its  stocks  goods  of  a  greater  variety 
and  value  than  those  at  the  disposal  of  any  private  sales  agency 
in  the  United  States.  This  branch  of  the  work  also  included 
the  sale  of  great  quantities  of  A.  E.  F.  supplies  in  Europe, 
which  was  already  glutted  with  the  surpluses  of  its  own 
armies.  The  sales  at  home  must  include  the  sale  of  hundreds 
of  buildings  put  up  for  the  war  establishment. 

Paradoxically,  demobilization  included  the  acquirement  of 
large  quantities  of  real  estate — for  the  storage  of  reserve  sup- 
plies and  the  creation  of  a  physical  plant  for  the  permanent 
military  establishment. 

Finally,  demobilization  meant  the  delicate  business  of 
striking  a  cash  balance  that  would  terminate  our  relations  with 
the  Allies,  meeting  their  claims  against  us  for  the  supply  of 
materials  and  for  the  use  and  destruction  of  private  property 
abroad,  and  pressing  our  own  claims  against  them  for  materials 
sold  to  them. 

The  astonishing  thing  was  the  swiftness  with  which  this 
great  program  was  carried  through.  Within  a  year  after  the 
last  gun  was  fired  America  had  returned  to  the  normal.  The 
whole  A.  E.  F.  had  been  brought  back  in  American  vessels  in 
ten  months.  In  that  time  practically  the  entire  Army  had  been 
paid  off,  disbanded,  and  transported  to  its  homes.  War  busi- 
nesses were  braked  to  a  standstill  in  an  average  time  of  three 
months,  without  a  single  industrial  disturbance  of  any  con- 
sequence. At  the  end  of  the  year  the  greater  part  of  the  manu- 
facturers' claims  had  been  satisfied  with  compromises  fair 
both  to  the  contractors  and  to  the  Government.  The  savings  in 
contract  terminations  and  adjustments  had  run  into  billions  of 


8  DEMOBILIZATION 

dollars.  A  blanket  settlement  had  been  made  with  the  Allies, 
thus  virtually  closing  up  our  business  in  Europe.  A  permanent 
military  policy  had  been  written  into  law.  The  storage  build- 
ings and  spaces  were  filled  with  reserve  materials  inventoried, 
catalogued,  and  protected  against  deterioration.  Packed  away 
compactly  were  the  tools  and  machinery  of  an  embryonic 
war  industry  ready  to  be  expanded  at  will  in  the  event  of 
another  war.  Materials,  largely  of  special  war  value  and  there- 
fore nonnally  to  be  regarded  as  scrap  and  junk,  had  been  sold 
to  the  tune  of  billions,  the  exercise  of  ingenuity  in  the  sales 
department  producing  a  recovery  that  was  remarkably  large, 
averaging  64  per  cent  of  the  war  cost. 

Such  was  our  war  demobilization.  No  other  single  business 
enterprise  in  all  human  history  compared  with  it  in  magni- 
tude ;  yet,  in  the  midst  of  the  peace  negotiations  and  amid  the 
economic  crises  fretting  the  earth,  it  attracted  scant  notice. 
To-day,  only  the  continuing  sale  of  surplus  war  materials  and 
the  adjudication  of  the  last  and  most  difHcult  of  the  industrial 
claims  give  evidence  of  the  enterprise  which  engaged  the 
efforts  of  the  whole  nation  so  short  a  time  ago. 


CHAPTER  II 
THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS 

THE  American  Expeditionary  Forces,  on  November  1 1, 
1918,  were  ill  prepared  to  conduct  the  manifold 
activities  leading  to  their  demobilization.  Up  to  that 
day  the  expedition  had  been  too  busy  going  ahead  to  think 
much  about  how  it  was  to  get  home.  But  now  had  come  the 
armistice,  the  end.  The  great  adventure  was  over.  The  guerre 
was  fini. 

At  once  a  great  wave  of  homesickness  spread  over  the 
A.  E.  F.  That  song  of  careless  valor,  "Where  do  we  go  from 
here*?"  to  the  swinging  beat  of  which  a  million  men  had 
marched  forward  over  the  French  roads,  became  a  querulous 
"When  do  we  go  home?"  When  indeed*?  It  had  taken  nearly 
a  year  and  a  half  to  transport  the  A.  E.  F.  to  France.  Dis- 
regarding the  fact  that  the  Army  overseas  had  at  its  disposal 
less  than  half  as  many  troopships  as  had  supported  it  up  to 
November  1 1,  before  the  men  could  start  home  in  great  num- 
bers there  had  first  to  be  created  in  France  an  embarkation 
system  with  a  capacious  equipment  of  camps  and  port  build- 
ings, if  the  expedition  were  to  return  in  good  order  and  not  as 
a  disorganized  mob. 

Never  was  a  daily  journal  scanned  with  such  emotion  as 
was  the  ^tars  and  Stripes  by  its  readers  during  this  period  of 
waiting.  The  Stars  and  Stripes  was  the  official  newspaper  of 
the  enlisted  men  of  the  A.  E.  F.  After  the  armistice  anything 
pertaining  to  the  return  of  the  troops  to  America  was  the  most 
important  news  which  the  publication  could  possibly  print. 
The  Stars  and  Stripes  published  the  monthly  schedules  of 
transport  sailings,  told  of  the  extraordinary  expansion  of  the 


lo  DEMOBILIZATION 

Yankee  transport  fleet,  noted  the  continual  improvement  in 
the  shipping  efficiency  of  that  fleet,  rejoiced  in  black-face  type 
when  some  ocean  flyer  broke  the  record  for  the  turn-around, 
as  the  round  trip  to  America  and  back  was  called,  and  in  gen- 
eral kept  the  personnel  of  the  expedition  informed  of  the 
movement  homeward.  But,  although  the  return  of  the  A.  E.  F. 
was  a  transportation  feat  actually  more  astonishing  than  that 
which  had  placed  the  forces  in  Europe,  yet  to  the  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  homesick  boys  who  watched  the  brown  fields  of 
France  turn  green  in  the  spring  of  1919,  the  pace  of  the  snail 
and  the  turtle  seemed  speed  itself  in  comparison  to  the  prog- 
ress made  by  the  demobilization  machine. 

The  A.  E.  F.  in  November,  1918,  possessed  no  port  equip- 
ment capable  of  quick  conversion  into  a  plant  for  embarking 
the  expedition.  There  had  been  no  need  of  large  port  installa- 
tions in  France  for  the  use  of  debarking  troops.  The  A.  E.  F. 
had  crossed  to  France  under  a  scheme  of  identification  that  was 
a  marvel  of  system  and  organization.  Once  the  system  was 
perfected,  every  military  unit  bore  as  part  of  its  name  a  so- 
called  item  number  that  told  the  debarkation  officers  (by 
reference  to  the  shipping  schedules)  exactly  where  each  unit 
should  go  upon  arrival.  So  it  was  with  individuals  and  small 
detachments  traveling  as  casuals.  Their  item  numbers  placed 
them  instantly  in  the  great  structure  of  the  A.  E.  F.  No  need 
for  vast  port  rest  camps  in  which  thousands  must  wait  until 
G.  H.  Q.  disposed  of  them.  They  were  placed  before  they 
sailed  from  America.  Expense  and  confusion  saved  by  the  art 
of  management ! 

The  armistice  changed  all  about.  Our  military  ports  in 
France  had  to  become  ports  for  the  embarkation  of  troops  with 
an  equipment  vastly  expanded.  America  had  sent  to  France  an 
Army  perfectly  clothed  and  accoutered.  For  the  sake  of  uni- 
formity the  home  ports  of  embarkation  had  prepared  the 
2,000,000  troops  for  the  voyage,  and  this  meant  issuing 
smaller  or  larger  quantities  of  clothing  and  other  personal 
articles  to  practically  every  man  who  sailed.  The  A.  E.  F. 
proposed  to  return  its  men  to  their  homes  well  dressed,  clean, 


THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS  1 1 

and  self-respecting,  and  it  was  logical,  too,  to  accomplish  this 
purpose  in  France  in  the  process  of  embarking  the  troops.  To 
carry  out  the  plan,  however,  required  an  extensive  plant, 
something  not  to  be  materialized  by  a  wave  of  the  hand. 
France  after  the  armistice  was  to  witness  an  extensive  military 
construction  carried  on  by  the  Americans  at  their  ports. 

Brest,  Bordeaux,  and  St.  Nazaire  had  been  the  three  prin- 
cipal landing  places  for  our  troops  sent  to  France  directly  from 
the  United  States.  Brest,  near  the  northeasternmost  extremity 
of  France,  possessed  a  harbor  with  water  that  could  accommo- 
date the  largest  ships  afloat,  but  the  water  near  shore  was  too 
shallow  for  docks  at  which  large  ships  could  berth.  Conse- 
quently the  troops  rode  in  lighters  between  ships  and  shore. 
This  was  Brest's  chief  disadvantage  as  a  military  port,  but  it 
was  not  a  serious  disadvantage. 

Next  southward  came  St.  Nazaire,  on  the  Loire  River  a 
few  miles  inland.  The  first  of  the  expeditionary  troops  landed 
at  St.  Nazaire,  in  July,  1917.  The  port  boasted  of  docks  with 
berths  for  troopships,  but  the  waters  of  the  river  were  too 
shallow  for  the  largest  transports. 

Still  farther  south  was  Bordeaux,  fifty-two  miles  from  the 
ocean  on  the  Gironde  River.  What  few  troops  landed  at  Bor- 
deaux were  incidental,  for  the  port  construction  at  Bordeaux 
and  other  great  developments  at  Bassens  and  Pauillac  nearer 
the  mouth  of  the  river  were  conducted  by  the  A.  E.  F.  with  the 
view  of  making  the  Gironde  the  chief  ocean  terminal  for  the 
reception  of  army  supplies  shipped  from  the  United  States. 
Troopships  could  tie  up  to  the  docks  at  Bordeaux,  but  the 
Gironde  was  so  narrow  and  its  tidal  currents  were  so  swift 
that  the  military  administration  of  the  port  had  to  manage 
the  stream  on  a  schedule  as  it  might  operate  a  single-track 
railroad.  There  were  several  places  in  the  river  where  vessels 
could  not  pass  each  other. 

After  November  1 1  followed  a  few  days  of  indecision  and 
bewilderment  in  the  A.  E.  F.  No  one  in  Europe  knew  precisely 
what  the  armistice  meant  or  what  the  victorious  armies  could 
expect.  Quickly,  however,  it  transpired  that  the  armistice  was 


12  DEMOBILIZATION 

permanent;  it  was  peace  itself  for  all  practical  purposes,  and 
the  only  forces  we  should  need  to  maintain  in  France  would  be 
those  chosen  to  conduct  the  measured  advance  into  Germany 
and  to  garrison  the  occupied  territory.  Within  a  week  General 
Pershing  designated  the  troops  for  the  Army  of  Occupation 
and  released  the  rest  of  the  American  Expeditionary  Forces 
(more  than  half  its  total  numerical  strength)  for  return  to 
the  United  States  as  soon  as  transportation  facilities  were 
available.  He  charged  the  Chief  Quartermaster  of  the  expedi- 
tion with  the  duty  of  embarking  the  returning  forces.* 

The  Chief  Quartermaster  of  the  A.  E.  F.  at  once  designated 
Brest,  St.  Nazaire,  and  Bordeaux  as  the  ports  of  embarka- 
tion. The  early  plan  was  to  send  20  per  cent  of  the  expedition 
home  via  Bordeaux  and  the  rest  in  equal  numbers  through 
St.  Nazaire  and  Brest.  As  it  worked  out,  practically  all  the 
overseas  soldiers  returned  through  these  three  ports,  although 
a  few  sailed  from  Marseilles,  Le  Havre,  and  La  Pallice.  The 
division  of  work,  however,  did  not  materialize  as  planned. 
Bordeaux  handled  less  than  its  fifth  of  the  forces,  and  the 
embarkations  at  St.  Nazaire  were  not  much  larger  than  those 
at  Bordeaux.  The  great  mass  of  the  A.  E.  F.  came  back  via 
Brest,  and  at  Brest  was  set  up  the  largest  installation  for  the 
embarkation  of  passengers  the  world  had  ever  seen. 

The  troops  of  the  A.  E.  F.  were  of  two  general  sorts — those 
of  the  line  organized  by  divisions,  corps,  and  armies,  also 
known  as  combat  troops,  and  those  of  supply,  who  conducted 
the  thousand  and  one  enterprises  necessary  to  the  maintenance 
of  a  force  as  large  as  the  A.  E.  F.  three  thousand  miles  away 
from  home.  The  two  sorts  of  troops  were  not  evenly  balanced 
in  number,  the  combat  troops  being  considerably  the  more 

*  In  this  the  system  differed  from  that  in  use  in  the  United  States.  Not 
the  Quartermaster  Corps  but  the  Embarkation  Service  in  the  United  States 
prepared  the  overseas  troops  for  the  voyage  and  embarked  them  on  the  trans- 
ports. The  Embarkation  Service  also  operated  many  of  the  transports.  After  the 
armistice  the  Embarkation  Service,  now  merged  into  the  Transportation  Service, 
continued  to  manage  the  Army's  ocean  shipping  facilities,  and  it  also  attended 
to  the  details  of  debarking  troops  at  the  ports  in  this  country;  but  its  juris- 
diction over  those  troops  began  only  after  they  had  boarded  the  ships  in 
France. 


Photo   by   Sic/Nul   L'oip; 


CAMP  STREET  IN  LE  MANS  AREA 


^^ 

Photo  by  Signal  Corps 


BATH  HOUSE  AT  BREST 


Photo  by  Howard  E.  Coffin 


IN  CAMP  PONTANEZEN 


Photo  by  Signal  (  .r/j 

COMPANY  STREET  IN  PONTANEZEN 


THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS  13 

numerous.  It  was  evident  that  their  embarkation  offered 
separate  problems. 

With  the  combat  troops  mass  travel  could  be  conducted  at 
its  greatest  efficiency.  The  divisional  troops  were  homogeneous, 
their  transportation  needs  were  essentially  alike,  and  a  single 
order  could  control  the  movements  of  tens  of  thousands  of 
them  at  once.  The  supply  troops,  on  the  other  hand,  were 
heterogeneous.  They  were  organized  in  thousands  of  units  of 
varying  sizes  and  kinds.  Many  of  them,  particularly  officers, 
were  serving  in  the  organization  as  individuals  attached  to  no 
particular  units.  The  travel  problems  of  these  various  elements 
differed  widely.  Therefore  it  was  decided  to  handle  the  embar- 
kation of  divisional  troops  and  supply  troops  separately.  The 
general  demobilization  plan  adopted  about  the  middle  of 
December,  1918,  provided  for  the  establishment  of  a  great 
embarkation  center  for  the  divisional  troops — an  area  which 
should  be  convenient  to  all  three  ports  of  embarkation,  in 
which  area  the  combat  troops  in  their  large  units  could  be  pre- 
pared for  the  overseas  voyage,  and  from  which  they  could  go 
directly  to  the  ships  without  pausing  in  the  embarkation  cities. 
The  installations  at  the  ports  themselves  were  to  be  used 
especially  in  the  embarkation  of  supply  troops. 

At  Le  Mans,  a  spot  about  midway  between  Paris  and  the 
Biscay  coast,  the  A.  E.  F.  possessed  a  plant  that  might  be 
expanded  quickly  to  serve  as  the  divisional  embarkation 
center.  When  the  great  flood  of  American  troops  began  de- 
bouching upon  French  soil  in  the  early  summer  of  1918  it 
became  evident  to  the  command  of  the  expedition  that  it 
needed  an  area  in  which  the  incoming  divisions  might  assemble 
as  their  units  debarked  from  the  transports  and  where  they 
might  rest  while  their  ranks  were  being  built  up  to  prescribed 
strength  by  the  addition  of  replacements.  By  this  time,  too,  the 
system  of  supplying  replacement  troops  to  the  A.  E.  F.  had 
become  automatic.  The  replacements  were  the  only  American 
soldiers  who  crossed  to  France  without  definite  objective. 
They  were  to  be  used  in  France  as  the  A.  E.  F.  needed  them  to 
fill  up  its  divisional  ranks.  It  was  necessary,  therefore,  to  pro- 


14  DEMOBILIZATION 

vide  a  reservoir  upon  which  the  depleted  combat  divisions 
could  draw  for  replacements.  Le  Mans  was  selected  as  the  site 
of  this  reservoir  and  also  as  the  assembling  point  for  the  de- 
barking organized  divisions.  The  Le  Mans  area  before  the 
armistice  was  known  as  the  A.  E.  F.'s  classification  and  re- 
placement camp. 

The  reasons  which  brought  about  the  selection  of  Le  Mans 
as  the  site  for  the  replacement  and  divisional  depot  served 
also  to  make  the  place  the  ideal  location  for  the  expedition's 
embarkation  center.  Le  Mans  was  at  the  junction  of  trunk- 
line  railroads  leading  to  Brest,  St.  Nazaire,  and  Bordeaux. 
It  also  possessed  good  railroad  connections  with  Paris  and  with 
the  front,  which  in  the  summer  of  1918  had  been  advanced 
by  the  Germans  until  it  was  close  to  the  metropolitan  limits 
of  Paris  and  was  therefore  not  far  from  Le  Mans.  The  depot 
was  established  in  July,  1918,  when  the  Eighty- third  Division 
occupied  the  area  as  its  depot  division.  At  that  time  the  depot 
as  projected  contemplated  the  construction  of  eight  divisional 
camps,  each  to  accommodate  26,000  men,  and  two  forward- 
ing camps,  one  with  accommodations  for  25,000  men  and  the 
other  for  15,000.  In  other  words,  the  camp  eventually  was  to 
accommodate  a  quarter  of  a  million  troops.  No  military  center 
in  the  United  States  compared  in  size  with  this  project. 

At  the  time  of  the  armistice  the  development  of  Le  Mans 
had  made  good  progress.  It  could  then  maintain  about  120,- 
000  troops.  On  December  14,  when  Le  Mans  was  officially 
designated  as  the  embarkation  center,  its  capacity  had  been 
increased  to  200,000.  Shortly  after  the  armistice  began,  its 
transient  population  jumped  to  100,000,  and  it  never  fell 
below  this  mark  until  the  late  spring  of  1919,  when  the  greater 
part  of  the  combat  divisions  of  the  A.  E.  F.  had  embarked  for 
the  United  States. 

The  Le  Mans  center  had  the  duty  of  completely  preparing 
for  embarkation  all  troops  received  in  the  area.  Theoretically 
every  man  who  passed  through  Le  Mans  was  prepared  to  go 
directly  to  a  transport.  This  meant  bathing  and  delousing  for 
every  man  who  came  to  the  camp,  inspecting  his  equipment 


THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS  15 

and  supplying  new  clothing  and  other  personal  articles  if  he 
needed  them,  and  perfecting  his  service  records  so  that  he 
might  encounter  no  difficulty  in  securing  his  final  pay  and 
discharge  in  the  United  States.  To  do  this  important  work 
quickly  and  well,  it  was  necessary  to  operate  an  institution 
of  impressive  size. 

The  dimensions  of  the  whole  camp  were  tremendous.  There 
was  nothing  like  it  in  the  United  States.  A  man  could  walk 
briskly  for  an  hour  in  a  single  direction  at  Le  Mans  and  see 
nothing  but  tents,  barracks,  drill  fields,  and  troops  lined  up 
for  preliminary  or  final  inspections.  The  task  of  feeding  this 
city  full  of  guests  was  so  great  that  the  camp  administration 
found  it  economical  to  build  a  narrow-gauge  railroad  system 
connecting  the  kitchens  with  the  warehouses.  Food  moved  up 
to  the  camp  cookstoves  by  the  trainload,  and  the  same  loco- 
motives that  brought  the  supplies  hauled  away  the  refuse.  A 
whole  adjacent  forest  was  cut  down  to  supply  firewood.  When 
the  Americans  occupied  the  section  there  were  no  adequate 
switching  facilities,  nor  were  there  storage  accommodations. 
The  Quartermaster  Corps,  which  operated  the  storage  project, 
cleared  a  field  in  the  midst  of  a  wood  and  used  the  clearing 
for  an  open  storage  space  (the  surrounding  trees  giving  a 
degree  of  shelter),  connecting  the  place  with  the  railroad  by 
constructing  a  spur  track.  Thereafter,  even  after  great  ware- 
houses had  been  built  in  the  clearing  and  it  had  become  the 
supply  depot  for  the  entire  camp,  requiring  the  services  of 
6,000  troops  in  its  operation,  the  place  was  known  to  the  camp 
as  "The  Spur."  As  an  addition  to  this  storage,  smaller  covered 
warehouses  were  provided  at  all  the  divisional  sub-depots.  At 
one  time  the  corrals  of  the  camp  contained  10,000  horses  and 
mules.  In  one  week  in  February,  1919,  nearly  32,000  troops 
arrived  in  camp,  a  fact  indicating  the  rate  at  which  troops 
passed  through  to  embarkation.  The  Quartermaster  Corps 
opened  two  great  central  commissaries  that  were  in  effect  de- 
partment stores.  The  camp  operated  a  large  laundry,  a  shoe 
repair  shop,  a  clothing  repair  shop,  and  numerous  other  indus- 
trial plants. 


i6  DEMOBILIZATION 

The  equipment  installed  at  Le  Mans  was  duplicated  in 
smaller  scale  at  the  three  embarkation  ports.  Yet  even  these 
port  installations  could  not  be  called  small.  Camp  Pontanezen 
at  Brest  could  give  accommodations  to  80,000  men  at  once. 
The  largest  embarkation  camps  in  the  United  States  were 
smaller  than  this.  There  were  thirteen  smaller  camps  and  mili- 
tary posts  at  Brest.  The  two  embarkation  camps  at  Bordeaux 
could  house  22,000  men,  but  there  were  billeting  accommoda- 
tions in  the  district  for  thousands  of  others.  The  construction  at 
St.  Nazaire  was  considerably  larger  than  that  at  Bordeaux,  but 
not  so  extensive  as  that  at  Brest. 

Most  of  these  camps  were  built  after  the  armistice,  and  the 
engineer  constructors  and  the  embarking  troops  elbowed  each 
other  as  embarkation  and  construction  proceeded  simultane- 
ously. Some  of  the  camps  had  served  as  rest  camps  prior  to  the 
armistice,  but  these  had  to  be  greatly  enlarged  and  improved 
in  equipment  before  they  could  give  adequate  service  as  em- 
barkation camps.  The  weather  along  the  northwestern  coast 
of  France  is  intensely  uncomfortable  and  disagreeable  to 
Americans.  In  the  winter  and  spring  especially,  the  rains  and 
mists  are  almost  incessant.  It  was  not  always  possible  to  choose 
ideal  sites  for  the  embarkation  camps  in  France.  The  sites  had 
to  be  near  the  ports,  and  in  the  thickly  inhabited  countryside 
the  American  authorities  were  forced  to  accept  whatsoever 
areas  they  could  get,  without  being  too  insistent  upon  such  fine 
points  as  natural  drainage  and  pleasant  surroundings. 

This  statement  is  particularly  applicable  to  Pontanezen, 
which  was  pitched  on  high  but  poorly  drained  ground.  Ordi- 
narily the  Army  would  not  have  occupied  such  a  location 
without  first  making  permanent  improvements.  The  continual 
rains,  the  lack  of  strong  drainage,  and  the  heavy  traffic  of  men, 
animals,  and  trucks  combined  to  make  the  Pontanezen  site  in 
1919  a  morass  of  quaking  mud.  Only  the  strongest  of  emer- 
gencies justified  its  use.  Because  of  the  daily  cost  of  maintain- 
ing the  A.  E.  F.  and  because  the  expeditionary  soldiers  them- 
selves wished  to  return  home  as  soon  as  possible,  regardless  of 
the  conditions  of  their  travel,  it  was  decided  to  make  use  of 


THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS  17 

these  port  camps  even  while  they  were  being  constructed, 
instead  of  holding  up  the  whole  movement  until  the  camp 
arrangements  could  be  made  perfect. 

Tales  of  suffering  among  our  soldiers  at  Pontanezen  came 
to  the  United  States  and  were  even  aired  on  the  floors  of  Con- 
gress, but  the  suffering  alleged  was  more  apparent  than  real. 
Those  who  went  through  the  experience  of  residence  in  Pon- 
tanezen, even  at  its  worst,  were  not  injured  in  health.  Despite 
appearances,  the  camp's  sanitary  arrangements  were  of  high 
merit.  The  medical  records  of  Camp  Pontanezen  show  that  its 
sickness  and  death  rates,  leaving  the  domestic  epidemic  of 
influenza  altogether  out  of  the  comparison,  were  as  low  as 
those  of  the  best  camps  in  the  United  States. 

In  the  spring  of  1919  most  of  the  construction  work  at  the 
embarkation  camps  was  complete,  and  they  became  more  com- 
fortable. The  camps  consisted  of  miles  of  one-story,  tar- 
papered,  rough-board  buildings  connected  with  wooden  side- 
walks of  duck-boards.  Pontanezen  was  a  complete  American 
city  set  down  amid  the  quaint  roads  of  old  Brittany.  It  had 
newspapers,  banks,  theatres,  stores,  public  libraries,  restau- 
rants, hospitals,  churches,  telephones,  and  electric  lights,  and 
even  a  narrow-gauge  railway  for  freighting  about  its  supplies. 
The  entire  American  military  population  in  the  camps  at  Brest 
quite  outnumbered  the  French  inhabitants  of  the  region.  The 
water  system  installed  by  the  Engineers  to  serve  all  the  Ameri- 
can establishments  at  the  port  was  sufficient  for  the  city  of 
150,000  people.  There  was  a  special  camp  for  casual  officers. 
A  section  of  this  camp  was  set  aside  for  the  French,  English, 
Belgian,  and  Italian  wives  that  American  soldiers  had  married 
abroad.  There  was  a  hospital  camp,  a  camp  for  the  white 
troops  on  permanent  duty  at  the  port,  and  another  for  colored 
troops  so  assigned.  There  were  numerous  small  camps  for  labor 
battalions,  and  a  special  camp  for  engineer  and  motor  trans- 
port organizations.  Not  far  away  was  a  large  German  prison 
camp. 

In  one  important  respect  embarkation  in  France  differed 
from  what  it  had  been  in  the  United  States.  It  was  extremely 


i8  DEMOBILIZATION 

necessary  to  rid  the  home-coming  troops  of  body  vermin  before 
placing  them  on  the  ships.  The  delousing  process  at  our  French 
ports  of  embarkation  was  the  most  thorough  experienced  by 
the  doughboy  during  his  foreign  service,  and  this  process 
chiefly  distinguished  embarkation  abroad  from  that  which  the 
soldier  had  known  at  Hoboken  and  Newport  News. 

Our  forebears  shared  none  of  the  modern  aversion  to  dis- 
cussion of  the  louse.  One  of  the  great  monarchs  of  France  set 
the  stamp  of  his  royal  approval  upon  scratching  publicly  when 
one  itched,  and  Robert  Burns  once  addressed  a  poem  to  a 
louse.  The  louse,  however,  cannot  survive  American  habits  of 
personal  cleanliness;  and,  justly  enough,  the  insect  has  become 
associated  with  filth  and  has  dropped  out  of  polite  conversa- 
tion. The  war  revived  the  fame  of  this  parasite.  An  inspection 
at  one  time  revealed  the  fact  that  90  per  cent  of  the  American 
troops  at  the  front  were  infested.  These  men  naturally  wrote 
home  about  it,  and  then  the  louse,  euphemized  as  "cootie," 
became  a  national  figure. 

There  was  a  serious  aspect  to  the  situation,  however,  that 
the  military  authorities  could  not  overlook.  Besides  being  a 
source  of  discomfort,  the  louse  is  the  sole  carrier  of  one  of  the 
most  dread  diseases  that  afflict  mankind — typhus  fever.  In 
bygone  times  typhus  was  known  variously  as  army  fever,  camp 
fever,  or  jail  fever.  It  was  particularly  prevalent  in  this 
country  at  the  time  of  the  Revolution,  and  it  existed  to  some 
extent  here  during  the  Civil  War — an  indication  of  what  must 
have  been  the  condition  of  individual  American  soldiers  in 
those  days.  Typhus  exists  to-day  practically  as  an  endemic  on 
the  central  plateau  of  Mexico,  the  range  of  the  disease  touch- 
ing the  border  of  the  United  States.  The  disease  cannot  invade 
this  country,  however,  because  of  the  lack  of  carriers.  But  if 
the  A.  E.  F.  had  returned  to  the  United  States  with  its 
2,000,000  men  lice-infested,  the  demobilized  soldiers  might 
have  distributed  typhus  carriers  from  one  end  of  the  country 
to  the  other  and  exposed  the  nation  to  a  terrible  menace. 

The  sanitary  regulations  of  the  A.  E.  F.  kept  typhus  away 
from  the  troops  by  controlling  the  lice.  The  Quartermaster 


THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS  19 

Corps  operated  a  number  of  mobile  delousing  plants  just  be- 
hind the  front  lines  and  in  the  billeting  areas  to  the  rear.  It 
is  interesting  to  note  that  these  plants  had  to  be  camouflaged 
because  the  airmen  of  the  enemy  sometimes  mistook  them  for 
batteries  of  artillery  and  directed  gunfire  upon  them.  As  these 
plants  increased  in  number  and  efficiency  they  reduced  the 
lousiness  of  the  combat  troops  to  a  scant  3  per  cent. 

As  long  as  our  troops  remained  in  France  largely  billeted  on 
the  French  population,  it  was  unlikely  that  the  field  sanitary 
measures  could  extinguish  the  louse  altogether;  but  the  com- 
mand of  the  expedition  determined  that  at  the  ports  of  embar- 
kation the  American  doughboy  should  bid  good-bye  to  P. 
vestimenti  forever.  The  importance  of  completely  delousing 
the  troops  was  emphasized  in  the  same  G.  H.  Q.  memorandum 
that  had  set  up  the  embarkation  system. 

In  pursuance  of  this  policy  every  embarkation  camp  in 
France  was  established  in  two  isolated  sections.  One  section 
was  known  as  the  "dirty"  camp  and  the  other  as  the  "clean" 
camp.  Upon  arrival  from  the  front  the  troops  first  took  quar- 
ters in  the  "dirty"  camp.  Between  the  two  sections  lay  the 
buildings  in  which  the  camp  administration  conducted  all  the 
various  processes  of  preparing  soldiers  for  embarkation  for 
the  United  States.  One  of  the  most  important  of  these  activi- 
ties was  bathing  and  delousing  the  troops.  As  far  as  scientific 
measures  could  prevent  it,  not  a  louse  was  permitted  to  cross 
from  the  "dirty"  camp  to  the  "clean"  camp.  The  measures 
were  highly  effective.  Only  a  few  men  were  found  to  be  in- 
fested upon  arrival  in  America.  For  these  there  were  final 
delousing  facilities  at  all  our  debarkation  camps.  When  the 
overseas  veterans  took  trains  for  home  at  the  Atlantic  ports 
they  were  completely  verminless.  The  medical  officers  at  the 
demobilization  centers  in  this  country  failed  to  discover  a 
single  exception. 

The  embarkation  plant  at  Bordeaux  was  known  to  return- 
ing soldiers  as  "The  Mill."  Its  processes  were  typical  of  those 
at  all  the  embarkation  camps  in  France.  The  Bordeaux  mill 
ground  swiftly,  yet  ground  exceeding  fine.  To  it  came  the 


20  DEMOBILIZATION 

raw  material — dirty,  ragged,  weary  humanity.  It  reached  out 
for  this  material,  whirled  it  into  its  machinery,  and  a  little 
while  later  delivered  from  the  other  end  its  finished  product — 
clean,  well-clothed,  deloused,  and  comfortable  American  sol- 
diers, their  service  records  compiled  up  to  the  minute,  Ameri- 
can money  in  their  pockets,  and  a  mighty  self-respect  swelling 
their  chests. 

To  France  America  sent  the  best  clothed  and  best  equipped 
army  that  had  ever  stepped  on  European  soil.  The  two  million 
men  arrived  in  France  outfitted  almost  completely  in  new 
clothing  and  equipment  which  they  had  received  in  the  Ameri- 
can embarkation  camps  just  before  they  boarded  the  trans- 
ports. In  1919  we  brought  home  the  first  American  army  that 
had  ever  fought  in  a  great  war  and  returned  in  anything  but 
rags.  By  special  act  Congress  gave  permission  to  each  dis- 
charged soldier  to  keep  his  uniform  and  certain  other  equip- 
ment when  he  returned  to  civilian  life.  Even  though,  for  most 
of  the  men  coming  up  into  the  embarkation  ports  in  France, 
their  final  discharge  was  only  a  few  weeks  away,  nevertheless 
the  military  organization  there  saw  to  it  that  every  man  was 
decently  clad  before  he  began  the  return  voyage,  and  this  often 
meant  the  issue  of  entirely  new  articles.  The  Quartermaster 
Corps  abroad  wanted  to  win  from  the  folks  at  home  the  ver- 
dict, when  they  had  looked  over  their  restored  boys — "Guess 
they  took  pretty  good  care  of  you  over  there,  after  all." 

The  "mill"  at  Bordeaux  was  housed  in  a  long,  low  hut  with 
separate  departments  for  the  chief  operations  necessary  to  the 
preparation  of  troops  for  embarkation,  the  steps  being  ar- 
ranged progressively.  At  the  entrance  end  were  the  executive 
offices.  Here  the  soldier,  as  he  passed  through,  received  his 
service  records,  withdrawn  from  his  company's  files,  and  also 
a  Red  Cross  bag  in  which  to  carry  his  personal  trinkets  and  his 
record  cards  and  papers  on  the  journey  through  the  "mill." 
Next  he  came  to  the  records  inspection  section,  where  officers 
perfected  the  entries  in  his  record.  Here  he  also  received  a 
copy  of  the  orders  under  which  his  unit  was  traveling,  his  pay 
card,  and  a  card  known  as  the  individual  equipment  record.  On 


THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS 


21 


the  equipment  card  appeared  the  printed  names  of  all  articles 
which  a  completely  outfitted  American  soldier  should  wear  or 
carry  wherever  he  went.  Next  the  soldier  stood  before  an 
inspector  who  examined  the  worn  equipment,  noted  wherein 
it  was  incomplete,  labeled  any  damaged  or  worn-out  articles 
for  discard  and  salvage,  and  checked  on  the  equipment  card 
such  new  articles  as  should  be  issued  to  the  soldier  later  on. 
The  standard  equipment  of  each  returning  soldier  was  as 
follows : 


1  Barrack  Bag 

2  Undershirts 

2  Pairs  of  Drawers 
2  Pairs  of  Socks 

1  Pair  of  O.  D.  Gloves 

2  O.  D.  Shirts 

1  Pair  of  Shoes 
1  Pair  of  Laces 
1  Pair  of  Breeches 
1  O.  D.  Coat 
1  Overseas  Cap 
1  Pair  of  Leggins 
1  Chevron     (for     noncom- 
missioned officers) 
1  Shelter  Half 

3  Blankets 
1  Overcoat 
1  Slicker 

1  Shaving  Brush 

1  Toothbrush 

1  Tube  Tooth  Paste 


1  Comb 

1  Piece  of  Shaving  Soap 

1  Towel 

1  Cake  of  Soap 

2  Identification  Tags 
1  Belt 

1  Razor 

1  Ammunition  Belt 

1  Pack  Carrier 

1  Haversack 

1  Canteen 

1  Canteen  Cover 

1  Condiment  Can 

1  Meat  Can 

1  Cup 

1  Knife 

1  Fork 

1  Spoon 

1  First  Aid  Pouch 

1  First  Aid  Packet 


The  soldier  next  went  to  the  disrobing  room,  where  he 
divested  himself  of  all  clothing  except  his  shoes,  which  he 
was  to  carry  through  with  him.  The  cootie  would  not  cling  to 
leather.  Then  he  passed  on  to  a  medical  examination  for  infec- 
tious disease.  If  he  passed  this  safely,  he  proceeded  to  the 
bathing  department,  where,  under  the  watchful  eyes  of  a  ser- 


22  DEMOBILIZATION 

geant,  he  soaped  and  scrubbed  himself  thoroughly,  first  in  a 
hot  shower  bath  and  then  in  a  cold  one.  Experience  had  taught 
that  the  greatest  enemy  of  the  louse  was  plain  soap  and  water 
and  plenty  of  it.  Meanwhile  certain  of  his  discarded  garments, 
if  they  were  in  good  condition  or  if  they  could  be  repaired  for 
future  wear,  had  been  sent  from  the  disrobing  room  to  the 
steam  sterilizer  in  another  part  of  the  building.  The  steriliza- 
tion process  took  thirty  minutes,  which  was  just  about  the 
time  it  took  the  soldier  to  go  through  the  "mill." 

Scrubbed  and  clean,  the  soldier  went  from  the  bath  into 
another  room  where  doctors  examined  him  for  diseases  of  the 
throat,  lungs,  and  skin.  After  that,  the  barber  shop  and  a  hair 
cut.  The  barber  shop  at  the  "mill"  was  equipped  with  fifty 
chairs. 

At  last  the  object  of  these  oflScial  attentions  reached  his 
goal,  the  equipment  room.  What  he  had  feared  in  the  process 
were  the  two  medical  inspections,  either  of  which  might  stop 
his  progress  instanter  and  send  him  scurrying  to  a  camp  hos- 
pital for  observation  or  treatment.  In  either  circumstance,  his 
embarkation  would  be  deferred  indefinitely.  But  if  he  were 
allowed  to  reach  the  equipment  room,  he  knew  he  was  safe. 
Here  he  found  great  bins  containing  large  quantities  of  the 
articles  named  on  the  equipment  card.  As  he  passed  the  bins 
every  soldier  received  clean  socks  and  underclothing,  new  tape 
for  his  identification  tags  and  a  clean  shelter  half  in  which  to 
carry  his  equipment.  He  also  received  such  new  articles  as 
were  checked  on  his  equipment  card. 

In  the  dressing  room  beyond,  he  found  waiting  for  him  a 
uniform  and  the  serviceable  portions  of  the  outfit  he  had 
brought  with  him  to  the  "mill,"  all  the  textile  articles  having 
been  thoroughly  deloused  and  sterilized.  He  found  his  old 
uniform,  if  that  had  been  in  good  condition;  otherwise,  a  new 
one  or  a  respectable  one  from  the  repair  factory.  Sometimes  his 
old  uniform  came  back  shrunken  and  faded  by  the  hot  steam 
of  the  delousing  plant.  In  that  event  a  serviceable  uniform  was 
substituted  for  it. 

The  final  station  in  the  "mill"  was  the  pay  office.  It  some- 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

1.  ENTERING  "MILL"  AT  BORDEAUX 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

2.  RECEIVING  CLEAN  CLOTHING  IN  "MILL" 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 


3.  THE  "MILL"  BARBERSHOP 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

4.  THROUGH  "MILL"  AND  READY  FOR  HOME 


THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS  23 

times  happened  that  troops  came  up  for  embarkation  with 
their  pay  months  in  arrears.  Now,  with  his  records  perfected, 
the  soldier  received  all  his  back  pay.  Thanks  to  the  exchange 
system  set  up  by  the  A.  E.  F.  in  the  embarkation  camps,  he 
received  his  pay  in  American  money,  perhaps  the  first  he  had 
seen  in  many  months.  The  "feel"  of  the  familiar  bills  and  the 
jingle  of  the  silver  were  like  a  taste  of  home.  Clean,  neatly 
clothed,  restored  once  more  to  man's  estate,  the  soldier  emerged 
from  the  "mill"  and  made  his  way  to  quarters  in  the  "clean" 
camp,  his  heart  light  because  he  knew  now  that  he  was  going 
home  "toot  sweet."  The  sense  of  well-being  moved  one  soldier- 
poet  to  praise  of  the  "mill"  as  follows: 

"Ye  go  in  one  end  dirty,  broke. 
So  dog  tired  ye  can't  see  a  joke. 
Ye  come  out  paid,  an'  plum'  remade, 
A  self-respectin'  soldier." 

The  embarkation  plant  at  Bordeaux,  if  pressed,  could 
cleanse,  delouse,  equip,  and  otherwise  prepare  for  the  home 
voyage  180,000  men  in  a  month.  During  the  busy  times  in 
1919  a  continuous  column  of  men  filed  through  the  depart- 
ments. They  went  through  in  blocks  of  twelve.  In  each  of  the 
various  departments  were  ten  booths,  each  accommodating 
twelve  men. 

The  processes  at  the  other  embarkation  camps  were  essen- 
tially the  same.  In  each  of  the  Le  Mans  divisional  camps  was 
installed  a  bathing  and  delousing  plant  with  a  capacity  of 
1,200  men  an  hour.  For  the  sterilization  of  clothing  in  the 
area  there  were  three  large  central  "disinfesting"  plants,  five 
smaller  stationary  steam  sterilizers,  and  more  than  a  dozen 
mobile  sterilizers. 

The  two  port  camps  at  Bordeaux  were  known  as  Camp 
Neuve  and  Camp  Genicart.  After  the  armistice  these  two 
camps  were  reorganized  and  enlarged.  Camp  Neuve  became 
the  "dirty"  or  entrance  camp.  It  accommodated  5,400  men. 
Camp  Genicart  was  designated  as  the  "clean"  or  evacuation 
camp,  and  its  barracks  could  house  nearly  17,000  men.  The 


24  DEMOBILIZATION 

busiest  day  for  Bordeaux  was  Sunday,  May  ii,  1919,  when 
6,399  "^^^^  passed  through  the  "mill"  and  made  ready  to  em- 
bark. St.  Nazaire  handled  15,306  embarkations  on  June  17, 
1919,  its  record  day. 

Salvage  was  an  important  operation  at  all  the  embarkation 
points  in  France.  Thousands  of  articles  of  apparel  discarded 
by  the  returning  troops  were  not  so  worn  but  that  they  could 
be  made  serviceable  again.  The  salvage  plant  at  Le  Mans 
could  repair  1,700  pairs  of  shoes,  dry-clean,  sterilize,  and  re- 
pair 4,000  pieces  of  clothing,  wash  10,000  garments  in  the 
laundry,  and  disinfect  10,000  blankets  every  day.  The  plant 
occupied  eight  buildings,  and  the  average  value  of  clothing 
repaired  monthly  was  over  $150,000.  There  were  salvage 
plants  also  at  Brest,  St.  Nazaire,  and  Bordeaux,  the  one  at 
Brest  being  of  great  size. 

The  task  of  feeding  men  at  the  embarkation  camps  gave  the 
Quartermaster  Corps  one  of  its  chief  problems.  Each  divisional 
sub-depot  at  Le  Mans  carried  at  all  times  sufficient  food  to 
supply  the  appetites  of  25,000  men  for  fifteen  days,  and  in 
addition  the  central  warehouses  contained  500,000  emergency 
rations  to  substitute  for  the  garrison  rations  if  anything  went 
wrong  with  the  food  supply.  In  December,  1918,  the  subsist- 
ence services  in  the  area  had  been  built  up  to  the  capacity  of 
500,000  rations  cooked  and  served  each  day. 

At  Brest  also  the  feeding  arrangements  were  laid  out  on  an 
immense  scale.  The  men  ate  food  prepared  in  standard 
kitchens,  each  capable  of  providing  subsistence  for  thousands. 
The  cold-storage  and  other  storage  spaces  of  one  of  the  stand- 
ard kitchens  were  large  enough  to  hold  such  items  as  10,000 
pounds  of  beef  and  6,000  pounds  of  bread.  The  kitchen  facili- 
ties included  a  meat  cutting  room,  a  tool  room,  a  scullery,  a 
garbage  incinerator,  a  great  mess  hall,  and  finally  the  galleys, 
each  of  which  contained  four  large  hotel  ranges  with  work- 
tables,  serving  tables,  and  all  necessary  cooking  utensils.  Ten 
men  did  the  booking  in  each  galley.  Each  mess  hall  was  280 
feet  long.  End  to  end,  its  metal  topped  tables  measured  495 


THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS  25 

feet  in  length.  Galleys,  storage  rooms,  and  mess  halls  had 
cement  floors.  The  whole  plant  was  illuminated  by  electricity. 

Each  mess  hall  at  Brest  was  operated  on  the  cafeteria  plan. 
Each  was  equipped  to  feed  20,000  soldiers.  The  men  entered 
the  hall  marching  in  column  of  squads.  They  passed  through 
the  galleys,  filling  their  kits  with  hot  food,  then  secured  places 
at  the  tables,  ate,  and  left  the  hall  at  the  opposite  end,  where 
there  were  refuse  cans  in  which  to  scrape  off  their  dishes  and 
also  tanks  of  boiling,  soapy  water  and  hot  rinsing  water.  Here 
they  cleaned  their  equipment.  The  facilities  were  such  that 
each  kitchen  could  serve  a  brigade  of  troops  entering  the  build- 
ing at  the  ordinary  marching  pace.  Frequent  inspections  kept 
the  food  up  to  standard.  The  camps  at  Brest  also  maintained 
night  soup  stands  at  which  any  soldier  could  get  bread  and  hot 
soup  between  the  hours  of  8 :  30  p.m.  and  2 :  30  a.m.  The  force 
that  operated  the  messing  facilities  at  Brest  numbered  1,600 
officers  and  men. 

At  Bordeaux  the  troops  temporarily  occupying  the  embarka- 
tion camps  cooked  their  own  meals  at  the  mess  halls,  drawing 
their  supplies  from  the  camp  organization.  At  St.  Nazaire  the 
messes  were  similar  to  those  at  Brest.  The  old  army  transport 
McClellan^  which  had  crossed  to  France  in  the  first  American 
convoy  in  1917,  was  stationed  at  St.  Nazaire,  where  it  served 
the  subsistence  organization  as  a  floating  refrigerator  with 
capacity  for  3,000,000  pounds  of  food.  The  McClellan  was 
too  old  to  stand  the  buffeting  of  the  North  Atlantic,  and  the 
Embarkation  Service,  unwilling  to  risk  bringing  her  home, 
turned  the  ship  over  to  the  A.  E.  F.  After  the  expedition  had 
returned  to  the  United  States  the  Government  sold  the  Mc- 
Clellan to  France. 

To  the  individual  soldier,  quite  the  most  important  branch 
of  the  embarkation  organization  was  that  one  which  paid  the 
money  due  him  from  the  Government.  It  paid  him  his  money 
in  francs,  either  in  the  currency  itself  or  by  check,  and  then  saw 
to  it  that  he  exchanged  his  French  money  for  its  equivalent  in 
American  currency.  Both  of  these  enterprises  in  finance — dis- 
bursement and  exchange — were  in  the  hands  of  the  A.  E.  F. 


26  DEMOBILIZATION 

Quartermaster  Corps.  The  disbursement  offered  little  diffi- 
culty, although  the  monthly  pay  roll  at  Brest  sometimes  con- 
tained as  many  as  100,000  names,  while  those  at  St.  Nazaire 
and  Bordeaux  were  proportionately  large.  The  question  of 
foreign  exchange  presented  more  of  a  problem. 

Soon  after  the  van  of  the  A.  E.  F.  reached  France  the  Treas- 
ury Department  at  Washington  requested  the  War  Depart- 
ment to  pay  all  its  troops  on  foreign  soil  in  the  money  of  the 
country  in  which  they  chanced  to  be  stationed.  This  meant  that 
most  of  the  men  of  the  expedition  received  their  pay  in  francs. 
Before  the  armistice,  questions  of  currency  exchange  were  of 
slight  concern  to  the  overseas  soldier.  After  the  Government 
had  deducted  his  allotment  to  his  dependents,  his  monthly 
premium  payment  for  war  risk  insurance,  and  his  partial 
payment  for  any  Liberty  Bonds  he  might  have  purchased 
through  the  Army,  there  was  not  much  left  for  him,  anyhow. 
When  francs  were  cheaper  he  received  more  of  them  from  the 
pay  officer  than  he  had  expected,  but  as  long  as  he  stayed  in 
France  and  spent  his  money  there  the  rate  of  exchange  made 
little  difference  to  him. 

French  exchange  continually  strengthened  during  the  so- 
journ of  the  expedition  in  France — until  after  the  armistice 
began.  The  normal  value  of  francs  is  5.18  to  the  dollar.  In 
July,  1917,  the  rate  was  5.70.  This  rate  gradually  improved 
until  at  its  strongest  point  it  stood  at  5.45.  The  few  wounded 
men  and  casuals  returning  to  the  United  States  during  this 
period  were  thus  able  to  benefit  financially  by  exchanging 
their  French  savings  for  American  currency. 

After  the  armistice,  however,  and  during  the  very  time  the 
expeditionary  troops  were  returning  to  the  United  States  in 
greatest  numbers,  the  exchange  value  of  the  franc  slumped 
badly.  Shortly  after  November  11,  1918,  the  rate  was  5.80 
to  1.  It  continued  to  fall  steadily  until  in  the  autumn  of  1919 
it  took  9.70  francs  to  purchase  one  dollar.  It  follows  that  the 
provident  soldier  who  had  saved  the  francs  paid  to  him  on  a 
basis  of  less  than  six  to  the  dollar  lost  heavily  when  he  was 
forced  to  convert  his  savings  back  into  dollars  again  on  a  basis 


THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS  27 

of  nearly  ten  francs  to  the  dollar.  The  loss  was  particularly 
heavy  upon  officers  who  maintained  drawing  and  savings  ac- 
counts in  French  banks  or  who  had  not  cashed  their  pay  checks. 
Sometimes,  too,  officers  lost  their  checks.  Later  they  obtained 
duplicates,  which  the  declining  exchange  had  made  less  valu- 
able. The  War  Department  considered  itself  bound  to  protect 
soldiers  from  losses  on  this  account.  Congress  is  now  consider- 
ing a  war  department  bill  which,  if  enacted  into  law,  will  pro- 
vide for  the  reimbursement  of  losses  incurred  by  soldiers  be- 
cause of  variations  in  foreign  exchange. 

It  was  good  financial  policy  for  the  A.  E.  F.  to  leave  all 
its  French  currency  behind  as  it  embarked  for  the  United 
States,  and  to  bring  home  only  American  money.  Yet  it  would 
have  resulted  in  confusion  in  the  A.  E.  F.  finances  to  have 
changed  the  pay  system  at  the  ports  of  embarkation.  Therefore 
the  Quartermaster  Corps  did  the  next  best  thing:  it  paid  off  the 
embarking  troops  in  francs  as  usual  and  then  immediately 
converted  their  francs  into  American  currency.  Since  both  pay- 
ment and  exchange  were  at  the  same  rate  of  exchange,  there 
was  no  loss  to  the  troops  in  this  transaction. 

In  order  to  provide  the  American  money  for  this  exchange 
it  was  necessary  for  the  Treasury  to  ship  to  France  great  quan- 
tities of  currency.  It  took  the  A.  E.  F.  some  time  to  convince 
the  Treasury  Department  of  the  necessity  for  such  shipments. 
The  day  after  the  armistice  began,  the  command  of  the  A.  E.  F. 
cabled  to  the  Treasury  requesting  the  immediate  shipment 
of  $500,000  in  currency,  an  order  afterwards  increased  to 
$2,000,000.  This  money  did  not  actually  reach  the  A.  E.  F. 
until  the  last  day  of  January,  1919.  By  that  date  the  expedi- 
tion was  beginning  to  embark  rapidly.  There  was  not  enough 
American  currency  in  Europe  to  buy  all  the  French  money  of 
the  expeditionary  troops,  and  only  by  the  most  strenuous 
efforts  could  the  Quartermaster  Corps  provide  money  for  ex- 
change until  the  first  shipment  of  currency  arrived  from  the 
United  States.  Finance  officers  were  stationed  in  Paris,  Lon- 
don, and  at  the  principal  seaports  with  orders  to  buy  all  the 
American  money  they  could  secure.  By  combing  the  banks  and 


28  DEMOBILIZATION 

the  count ingrooms  of  brokers  and  by  maintaining  in  Paris  a 
fund  from  which  shipments  were  rushed  by  motor  convoys  to 
the  ports  as  these  exhausted  their  supplies  of  currency,  the 
Corps  managed  to  keep  the  exchange  system  running.  After 
the  January  shipment  of  $2,000,000  the  Treasury  Depart- 
ment arranged  for  an  automatic  supply  of  $10,000,000  every 
month. 

Meanwhile,  at  the  ports  the  Corps  had  built  up  the  exchange 
plan.  Booths  were  set  up  on  all  docks,  and  a  force  of  disbursing 
quartermasters  was  organized  to  go  on  board  all  transports  and 
exchange  the  money  of  soldiers  who  had  failed  to  make  the 
exchange  on  shore.  The  A.  E.  F.  passed  an  order  making  it 
compulsory  for  all  soldiers  to  exchange  their  cash  before  sail- 
ing. Notices  to  this  effect  were  posted  conspicuously  in  all 
the  embarkation  camps.  In  the  larger  units  the  officers  attended 
to  the  matter,  collecting  the  French  money  from  their  men, 
receiving  American  money  for  it  from  the  exchange  officers, 
and  then  distributing  the  familiar  currency  among  the  troops. 
Individuals  and  men  traveling  in  small  units  attended  to  their 
own  exchange.  The  quartermasters  at  Brest  distributed  as 
much  as  $400,000  in  American  currency  in  a  single  day.  Up 
to  July  1  Brest  had  paid  out  $60,000,000  in  American  money 
to  troops  boarding  ship  there. 

By  the  late  spring  of  1919  most  of  the  combat  divisions, 
except  those  on  active  duty  with  the  Army  of  Occupation,  had 
crossed  the  ocean  or  had  started  for  home.  By  that  time  the 
facilities  at  the  base  ports  had  been  developed  to  a  capacity 
that  enabled  them  to  handle  all  further  embarkations,  and  the 
command  of  the  expedition  closed  and  abandoned  the  embar- 
kation center  at  Le  Mans.  All  of  the  physical  equipment  there 
went  to  the  French  Government  under  the  terms  of  the  general 
sale  consummated  in  August  of  that  year.  On  June  30  Bor- 
deaux was  closed  as  a  port  of  embarkation.  It  had  embarked 
258,000  troops.  St.  Nazaire  officially  ceased  to  exist  as  a  port 
of  embarkation  on  July  26,  although  thereafter  it  embarked 
a  few  casuals.  Approximately  500,000  American  soldiers  said 
farewell  to  France  at  St.  Nazaire. 


THE  A.  E.  F.  EMBARKS  29 

A  million  and  a  quarter  American  expeditionary  soldiers 
departed  from  Brest  for  the  United  States.  Brest  was  the  last 
of  the  ports  to  close.  The  embarkation  of  the  millionth  Ameri- 
can at  Brest  seemed  almost  as  momentous  as  the  arrival  of  the 
millionth  American  in  France  a  year  earlier.  In  August  Gen- 
eral Pershing  and  the  historic  First  Division  sailed  from  Brest, 
and  the  last  of  the  combat  troops  had  gone.  On  October  1 
American  troops  were  stationed  in  France  only  at  Brest  and 
in  Paris,  but  Brest  continued  in  operation  as  the  port  of  em- 
barkation until  the  last  American  had  departed.  On  October 
1  there  were  a  few  thousand  men  still  to  sail,  but  the  A.  E.  F. 
no  longer  existed  in  France.  Its  headquarters  had  moved  to 
Washington.  The  great  task  was  done. 


CHAPTER  III 
THE  TRANSATLANTIC  FERRY 

ON  the  first  day  of  the  armistice,  before  Washington 
knew  its  exact  terms  or  could  form  an  estimate  of 
how  great  a  force  we  should  have  to  maintain  in 
France  pending  the  conclusion  of  permanent  peace,  General 
Frank  T.  Hines,  the  Chief  of  the  Embarkation  Service,  which 
had  administered  the  great  work  of  transporting  the  2,000,- 
000  men  of  the  A.  E.  F.  to  France  and  had  carried  nearly  half 
of  them  across  the  ocean  in  its  own  ships,  placed  before  the 
Secretary  of  War  a  plan  for  the  return  of  the  troops. 

It  can  be  said  that  the  outlook  for  the  speedy  repatriation 
of  the  overseas  soldiers  was  not  bright.  It  had  taken  nearly 
seventeen  months  to  transport  the  expedition  to  Europe,  and 
more  than  half  of  the  men  had  crossed  in  the  ships  of  other 
nations.  England  had  been  the  chief  contributor  of  tonnage  to 
our  overseas  movement  prior  to  November  1 1 .  To  build  up  on 
the  western  front  the  numerical  superiority  that  was  the  chief 
factor  in  the  victory,  the  British  Empire  combed  the  seas  for 
suitable  passenger  ships,  cut  her  own  civilian  requirements  to 
the  minimum,  and  devoted  to  our  transport  service  every  ton 
of  troop-carrying  capacity  she  could  procure.  France  and  Italy 
had  each  supplied  a  few  vessels. 

With  the  immense  fleet  thus  assembled  the  War  Depart- 
ment transported  men  across  the  Atlantic  with  an  intense  con- 
centration of  effort  never  before  known.  First  in  the  determi- 
nation that  the  Germans  should  not  conquer,  later  in  the 
assurance  that  we  ourselves  should  win,  the  Department 
shipped  the  troops  over  with  scarcely  a  thought  of  how  they 
were  going  to  get  back  again.  Future  events  were  to  be  allowed 
to  take  care  of  themselves. 


Photo 


KITCHENS  AT  LE  MANS 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 


STREET  IN  LE  MANS  AREA  NO.  5 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

CASUALS  ON  TRANSPORT  LEAVING  BREST 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

BOARDING  TRANSPORT  FROM  LIGHTERS,  BREST 


THE  TRANSATLANTIC  FERRY  31 

Now  such  events  had  come  to  pass.  England,  faced  with  the 
sudden  necessity  of  returning  her  own  colonial  soldiers  to  their 
native  lands,  and  looking  ahead,  too,  to  the  restoration  of  her 
all-important  foreign  commerce,  immediately  withdrew  her 
tonnage  from  our  service.  France  and  Italy  did  likewise.  The 
magnificent  "bridge  of  ships"  on  which  the  American  Expedi- 
tion had  crossed  the  Atlantic  melted  away,  and  2,000,000 
Americans  found  themselves  partially  marooned  in  a  strange 
land. 

Yet  not  completely  marooned.  The  fleet  of  American-flag 
troopships  assembled  during  the  war  had  on  the  day  of  the 
armistice  a  one-trip  capacity  of  112,000  military  passengers. 
Operated  in  armed  and  guarded  convoys,  this  shipping  could 
not  quite  average  one  round-trip  transatlantic  voyage  a  month ; 
its  transporting  capacity  under  war  conditions  was  somewhere 
in  the  neighborhood  of  1 00,000  troops  a  month.  The  armistice 
did  away  with  the  need  of  steaming  in  convoy  and  allowed 
the  transports  to  be  operated  by  the  much  more  efficient  sys- 
tem of  individual  sailings.  Under  such  conditions  the  monthly 
capacity  of  the  American-flag  fleet  was  about  150,000  men. 
This  capacity  was  to  be  discounted  somewhat  by  the  fact  that 
practically  all  of  the  vessels  had  reached  a  point  of  having  to 
be  retired  for  a  season  of  reconditioning  and  repair.  It  was 
evident  that,  unless  this  fleet  were  aided,  it  would  take  it, 
under  the  most  favorable  conditions,  over  a  year  to  bring  home 
the  A.  E.  F. ;  and  it  was  likelier  that,  actually,  the  spring  of 
1920  would  be  at  hand  before  the  last  of  the  overseas  soldiers 
set  foot  once  more  on  their  native  soil.  General  Hines's  plan 
provided  for  such  aid.  It  discounted  in  advance  the  subsequent 
fact  that  the  Allies  withdrew  their  passenger  ships,  and  turned 
to  our  own  resources  for  increased  transport  capacity. 

It  appeared  that  we  should  have  considerable  tonnage  avail- 
able for  such  use — tonnage  released  by  the  armistice  from 
other  service.  For  one  source,  there  was  the  Navy.  Its  battle- 
ships and  cruisers  variously  had  been  protecting  the  coast, 
convoying  transports,  and  holding  themselves  ready  in  the 
combined  Grand  Fleet  to  meet  the  expected  German  naval 


32  DEMOBILIZATION 

attack  in  force.  These  duties  had  come  to  an  end.  The  Hines 
plan  contemplated  the  temporary  conversion  of  a  number  of 
war  vessels  into  troop  carriers  by  the  installation  of  berths  and 
messing  accommodations.  Although  all  foreign  tonnage  was 
to  be  withdrawn  at  once,  the  Transportation  Service  hoped  to 
secure  some  additional  capacity  by  chartering  passenger  vessels 
from  foreign  owners  under  new  arrangements. 

The  most  promising  source  of  new  capacity,  however,  lay 
in  the  fleet  of  army  cargo  transports  which,  on  the  day  of  the 
armistice,  represented  about  2,500,000  deadweight  tonnage* 
in  the  aggregate.  The  armistice  immediately  rendered  a  great 
part  of  this  tonnage  no  longer  necessary  to  the  Government  in 
the  maintenance  of  a  vast  overseas  supply  service.  The  A.  E.  F. 
was  thereafter  to  exist  on  a  garrison  basis,  requiring  only  the 
ordinary  garrison  supplies  of  food  and  clothing.  The  great 
cargoes  of  ordnance  and  aircraft,  of  raw  steel  and  semi- 
finished materials  for  the  French  and  English  munitions  plants, 
of  horses  and  mules,  of  railway  and  engineering  supplies — 
the  tonnage  which  had  laden  the  cargo  fleet  in  the  past  and  had 
heaped  up  at  the  Atlantic  terminals — were  to  cross  the  ocean 
no  more.  It  was  proposed  to  take  the  best  of  the  cargo  trans- 
ports and  convert  them  immediately  into  troopships. 

The  War  Department  adopted  the  entire  plan,  and  the  first 
act  of  the  Transportation  Service  was  to  begin  a  survey  of  the 
cargo  fleet  to  determine  what  vessels  were  most  suitable  for 
conversion.  Only  the  larger  and  faster  boats  would  serve,  and 
of  course  they  had  to  be  ships  with  holds  adapted  to  the  instal- 
lation of  troop  quarters.  Specialized  vessels,  such  as  tankers 
and  ore  carriers,  would  not  do. 

For  the  Transportation  Service  the  armistice  was  but  an 
episode.  It  merely  changed  the  character  of  its  work  and  added 
to  the  volume  of  it.  The  peak  of  the  operations  curve,  so  far  as 
troop  transportation  was  concerned,  was  not  reached  until 
eight  months  after  the  armistice  had  been  in  effect.  The  thou- 
sands of  troops  in  the  Transportation  Service  yearned  for  dis- 

*  Deadweight  tonnage  represents  the  weight  of  cargo  it  takes  to  sink  a 
vessel  in  the  water  from  her  light-load  line  to  her  deep-load  line. 


THE  TRANSATLANTIC  FERRY  33 

charge  and  home  as  ardently  as  did  the  rest  of  the  Army;  yet 
these  men  realized  that  it  would  be  months  before  their  work 
could  end.  Meanwhile  they  would  have  to  see  hundreds  of 
thousands  proceeding  to  demobilization  camps  as  rapidly  as 
steamships  and  trains  could  carry  them,  with  never  a  thought 
of  the  transportation  men  who  had  made  their  early  discharge 
possible. 

The  resulting  drop  in  morale  was  one  difficulty  which  the 
Transportation  Service  faced  at  the  outset  of  its  labors  in 
demobilization,  but  one  which  it  met  and  solved  successfully. 
Another  more  concrete  one  had  to  do  with  the  operation  of 
troopships.  Early  in  the  war  the  Army  had  turned  over  to  the 
Navy  the  task  of  operating  most  of  the  troopships  at  sea,  prin- 
cipally because  the  military  authorities  found  themselves  unable 
to  compete  with  the  high  wages  of  the  munitions  industries  in 
securing  civilian  crews  for  vessels.  The  Navy,  with  the  uniform 
it  offered  and  its  appeal  to  patriotism,  had  no  such  trouble ;  and 
consequently  it  assumed  the  operation  of  the  troop  transports 
and  manned  them  with  bluejackets.  These  young  Americans 
enlisted  for  danger  and  adventure  and  had  no  stomach  for  the 
work  of  operating  a  collection  of  prosaic  ferry-boats  across  the 
now  safe  Atlantic.  The  Navy  Department,  seeing  that  it  could 
not  hold  them  in  service,  notified  the  War  Department  to  take 
back  its  ships.  This  the  Transportation  Service  did,  hiring 
civilian  crews  and  placing  them  aboard  the  troop  transports  at 
a  rate  that  relieved  the  Navy  of  the  work  entirely  by  the  sum- 
mer of  1919,  except  that  the  Navy  continued  to  operate  three 
or  four  troopships  with  crews  made  up  of  men  serving  under 
term  enlistments. 

While  the  Transportation  Service  was  contemplating  the 
conversion  of  many  of  its  cargo  carriers  into  troopships  and 
the  consequent  use  of  the  vessels  for  a  number  of  months  to 
come,  it  was  subjected  to  pressure  from  the  owners  of  some  of 
these  same  ships,  who  demanded  that  the  Government  give 
them  up.  Practically  all  of  its  cargo  tonnage  the  Army  held 
under  charter  from  private  ownership,  the  charters  running 
during  the  emergency.  After  the  armistice  the  vessel  owners 


34  DEMOBILIZATION 

naturally  desired  to  get  back  into  the  race  for  foreign  com- 
merce. It  was  to  the  interest  of  the  United  States  that  the  mili- 
tary tonnage  be  so  employed  at  the  earliest  possible  time,  but 
the  early  return  of  the  overseas  expedition  was  even  more 
important,  and  it  received  the  priority. 

Another  obstacle  in  the  way  of  carrying  out  the  Service's 
demobilization  plan  swiftly  and  efficiently  was  the  congested 
condition  of  the  American  shipyards,  practically  all  of  which 
were  engaged  to  the  limits  of  their  capacities  in  new  construc- 
tion for  the  Emergency  Fleet  Corporation,  This  congestion  not 
only  hampered  the  project  to  convert  the  cargo  vessels  into 
troop  carriers,  but  it  also  strung  out  the  necessary  work  of 
overhauling  the  regular  troop  transports  already  in  commis- 
sion. For  over  a  year  these  vessels  had  been  driven  mercilessly 
through  fair  weather  and  foul,  with  never  a  let-up  for  the 
general  repairing  and  reconditioning  which  every  ship  needs 
at  intervals.  Large  forces  had  been  carried  on  all  of  them  as 
part  of  the  crews  to  keep  the  vessels  going  somehow  by  making 
emergency  repairs  whenever  needed.  Only  conditions  as  they 
existed  before  the  armistice  warranted  such  abuse.  The  armi- 
stice occurred  opportunely  for  most  of  these  vessels,  and  par- 
ticularly for  the  ex-German  liners.  War  or  no  war,  they  had 
about  reached  the  point  where  they  had  to  be  drydocked,  re- 
gardless of  the  effect  upon  the  overseas  movement.  After  the 
armistice  it  would  have  been  folly  to  set  this  tonnage  at 
another  great  task  without  first  putting  it  in  good  condition. 
To  do  the  work  the  Transportation  Service  had  at  its  disposal 
only  its  own  repair  yards  at  New  York  and  the  drydock  and 
ship  repair  yard  of  the  Newport  News  Shipbuilding  Company. 
Because  of  this  limitation  the  shipping  was  tied  up  longer  than 
would  normally  have  been  necessary. 

The  survey  conducted  by  the  Transportation  Service  imme- 
diately after  the  armistice  designated  fifty-eight  cargo  trans- 
ports for  conversion.  They  were  the  largest  vessels  of  the 
cargo  fleet,  and  conversion  equipped  them  to  carry,  on  the 
average,  2,500  troops  on  each.  Thus  the  project  added  125,000 
accommodations  to  the  trip  capacity  of  the  troop-carrying  fleet 


THE  TRANSATLANTIC  FERRY  35 

as  it  existed  on  the  day  of  the  armistice — more  than  doubling 
it  in  size.  By  December  13  the  survey  was  complete  and  the 
marine  architects  were  drawing  the  conversion  specifications 
for  the  individual  vessels;  and  on  that  day  the  Service  awarded 
the  first  of  the  contracts,  that  for  converting  the  Buford  (which 
later  carried  the  exported  radicals  to  Russia  and  gained  fame 
as  the  "Soviet  Ark").  The  cost  of  remodeling  the  Buford  was 
$70,000,  and  the  contractor  completed  the  work  in  twenty- 
eight  days.  By  the  end  of  the  year  twenty  conversion  contracts 
had  been  placed.  Others  followed  at  intervals  until  April  29, 
1919,  when  the  last  of  them  was  signed.  Before  June  1  all 
fifty-eight  ships  were  in  service  as  troopships. 

In  spite  of  adverse  conditions  in  industry  the  ship  con- 
tractors made  extraordinarily  good  time  in  remodeling  these 
vessels.  Such  conversion  was  practically  a  rebuilding  job.  It 
meant  tearing  out  practically  the  entire  interiors  of  the  hulls 
and  rebuilding  to  provide  troop  quarters,  galleys,  mess  rooms, 
and  sanitary  facilities.  The  average  time  for  completing  this 
work  was  forty-one  days  and  the  average  cost  was  more  than 
$161,000.  The  total  cost  was  about  $9,000,000. 

It  will  be  seen  that  the  project,  because  of  its  expense  if  on 
no  other  account,  was  a  bold  step  for  the  Transportation  Serv- 
ice to  take.  The  cost  of  conversion  per  passenger  accommo- 
dated was  about  $72 — more  than  the  cost  of  a  single  steerage 
passage  across  the  Atlantic  on  a  commercial  liner.  Looked  at 
in  a  broader  way,  however,  the  expenditure  of  the  $9,000,000 
was  really  an  economy,  for  it  enabled  the  Government  to  bring 
home  and  discharge  several  hundred  thousand  soldiers  weeks 
and  even  months  sooner  than  would  otherwise  have  been 
possible. 

This  single  act  of  converting  the  cargo  transports  into  troop 
carriers  did  more  than  any  other  one  thing  to  expedite  the 
return  of  the  A.  E.  F. ;  yet  the  aggressiveness  of  the  Trans- 
portation Service  did  not  end  there.  Under  the  terms  of  the 
peace  treaty  Germany  agreed  to  turn  over  to  the  Allies  under 
charter  most  of  the  remnant  of  her  formerly  great  passenger- 
carrying  merchant  fleet.  For  nearly  five  years  these  vessels 


36  DEMOBILIZATION 

had  swung  at  their  moorings  in  German  harbors  and  rivers. 
At  her  pier  in  the  river  Elbe  was  the  htiperator^  the  largest 
ship  in  the  world,  exceeding  in  size  her  sister  ship  Vaterland, 
which  had  become  the  U.  S.  Transport  Leviathan.  The  Allied 
Maritime  Transport  Council,  which  had  allocated  world  ton- 
nage in  the  struggle  against  the  submarine,  decided  to  divide 
this  fresh  German  tonnage  equally  between  Great  Britain  and 
the  United  States,  giving  us  all  the  larger  vessels  because  we 
possessed  harbors  that  could  accommodate  them.  The  smaller 
ships  England  was  to  use  in  repatriating  her  Australian  troops. 

General  Hines,  the  chief  of  our  Transportation  Service, 
took  part  in  the  proceedings  in  London,  securing  from  the 
Council  ten  large  German  vessels.  At  once  a  U.  S.  navy  board, 
headed  by  Admiral  Benson,  chief  of  the  Bureau  of  Operations 
during  the  great  struggle,  went  to  Germany  to  put  the 
allotted  ships  in  condition  for  service.  Repairs  were  quickly 
made,  and  presently  all  ten  ships,  propelled  by  machinery 
unfamiliar  to  American  sailors,  sailed  out  of  the  German  har- 
bors and  into  the  harbor  at  Brest,  manned  from  bridges  to 
firing  rooms  by  Yankee  bluejackets  and  their  officers. 

From  the  London  conference  General  Hines  went  to  see 
various  shipping  concerns  in  European  Allied  and  neutral 
countries  and  secured  by  charter  thirty-three  passenger  ships 
in  all — thirteen  from  Italian  owners,  twelve  from  Spanish 
and  Dutch  ownership,  and  eight  from  French  interests. 

Long  before  this  event  the  Navy  had  taken  fourteen  of  its 
battleships  and  ten  armored  cruisers  and  by  the  installation 
of  berths  and  other  accommodations  had  turned  them  into 
passenger  boats  capable  of  carrying  28,600  troops  at  once. 
These  vessels  added  to  the  homeward  movement  more  than  a 
division  of  troops  a  month. 

Thus  was  the  Atlantic  rebridged  after  the  armistice  and 
with  a  structure  even  broader  and  more  capacious  than  the  one 
on  which  the  expedition  had  crossed  to  France.  On  June  23, 
1919,  the  troopship  fleet  reached  its  greatest  expansion.  On 
that  day  it  consisted  of  174  vessels  with  trip  accommodations 
for  419,000   troops.    It   could   have   transported    the   entire 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

TROOPS  ON  BATTLESHIP  READY  FOR  MESS 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

WARSHIPS  WITH  TROOPS  DOCKING  AT  HOBOKEN 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

EMBARKING  FOR  UNITED  STATES 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

MESS  ROOM  ON  CONVERTED  CARGO  TRANSPORT  OHIOAN 


THE  TRANSATLANTIC  FERRY  37 

A.  E.  F.  in  five  trips,  with  room  to  spare.  It  was  greater  in 
capacity  than  the  combined  facilities  at  our  disposal  before  the 
armistice,  yet  practically  all  of  it  sailed  under  the  Stars  and 
Stripes.  In  number  of  ships  it  was  four  times  as  large  as  the 
troop  fleet  which  the  Army  held  in  charter  and  ownership  on 
November  1 1 .  It  outnumbered  by  forty  vessels  the  combined 
fleet  both  of  American  and  of  Allied  troopships  at  our  disposal 
before  the  armistice.  Yet  on  the  day  of  the  armistice  we  seemed 
to  have  exhausted  the  possibilities  of  ocean  shipping  I 

Always  courageous  and  swift  in  action,  the  Transportation 
Service  was  one  of  the  first  of  the  war  department  bureaus  to 
anticipate  the  armistice  and  the  consequent  demobilization.  On 
November  1,  ten  days  ahead  of  the  armistice,  upon  the  con- 
fidential intelligence  that  the  German  Government  had  ordered 
its  fleet  out  to  give  battle  to  the  Grand  Fleet  of  the  Allies,  and 
further  assured  that  the  defeat  of  Germany  on  land  was  in 
sight,  the  Transportation  Service  stopped  the  overseas  move- 
ment of  all  combat  troops.  Primarily  this  action  was  taken  to 
avoid  a  disaster  to  our  troop  transports,  a  disaster  almost 
bound  to  occur  if  in  the  expected  forthcoming  naval  engage- 
ment any  of  the  German  warships  were  by  chance  able  to  slip 
through  the  Allied  cordon  and  reach  the  Atlantic.  After  the 
armistice  the  anticipatory  act  of  the  Transportation  Service 
proved  to  be  of  material  benefit  in  demobilization,  for  it  had 
kept  away  from  France  at  least  four  divisions  of  troops, 
diminishing  by  so  much  the  work  of  bringing  back  the  expedi- 
tion. 

On  the  fifth  day  of  the  armistice  General  Pershing  named 
thirty  divisions  that  were  to  conduct  the  advance  of  the  Army 
of  Occupation  to  the  Rhine  and  hold  open  the  communica- 
tions, designated  the  supply  troops  to  support  the  divisions, 
and  released  the  rest  of  the  Expeditionary  Forces  for  return 
to  the  United  States  as  soon  as  transportation  facilities  could 
be  provided.  This  order  freed  nearly  half  the  expedition  for 
demobilization.  A  million  men  were  thus  ready  to  return  home 
at  once. 

While  the  authorities  in  France  were  preparing  for  the  em- 


38  DEMOBILIZATION 

barkation  to  come,  there  was  at  hand  a  job  in  overseas  trans- 
portation to  which  the  Transportation  Service  could  turn  with 
such  troopships  as  were  available  for  immediate  use.  In  Eng- 
land on  the  day  of  the  armistice  there  were  stationed  more  than 
70,000  American  soldiers,  most  of  them  members  of  the  air 
service  squadrons  undergoing  training  in  the  British  aviation 
camps.  Their  embarkation  through  the  large  British  seaports 
offered  no  particular  difficulty.  On  our  own  regular  transports 
and  in  such  space  as  the  Army  could  secure  on  British  commer- 
cial liners,  this  whole  force  was  set  down  in  the  United  States 
within  six  weeks  after  the  armistice  began. 

The  embarkation  of  the  A.  E.  F.  in  France  may  be  said  to 
have  started  about  the  middle  of  December,  simultaneously 
with  the  appearance  of  the  order  establishing  the  three  em- 
barkation ports  and  the  embarkation  area  at  Le  Mans.  From 
then  on  week  by  week  the  embarkations  of  home-coming  troops 
steadily  increased  in  number.  In  January  the  first  of  the  con- 
verted cargo  transports  joined  the  troopship  fieet.  A  little  later 
some  of  the  chartered  foreign  tonnage  appeared  in  the  service. 
About  that  time,  too,  the  Navy  began  adding  its  increment  of 
war  vessels  fitted  out  as  troop  carriers.  In  the  late  spring  we 
secured  the  German  tonnage.  In  June,  1919,  the  American 
troop  sailings  reached  a  maximum  never  before  attained  in 
any  military  or  civilian  movement.  In  that  month  368,300 
American  soldiers  embarked  on  transports  in  France,  and 
343,600  landed  on  American  soil.  The  movement  exceeded  by 
60,000  men  that  of  the  greatest  month  in  the  transport  of  the 
A.  E.  F.  to  France.  In  taking  the  forces  to  France  we  had  been 
assisted  by  the  merchant  marines  of  the  principal  Allies  to  the 
limit  of  their  combined  capacities,  but  we  brought  back  the 
expedition  single-handed. 

This  great  record  was  made  possible  not  only  by  the  utiliza- 
tion of  all  tonnage  that  could  be  adapted  to  such  service,  but 
also  by  the  operation  of  the  shipping  at  its  highest  efficiency. 
The  drop  in  morale  among  the  personnel  of  the  Transporta- 
tion Service  in  the  first  disheartening  weeks  of  the  armistice 
was  soon  offset  by  the  spirit  of  the  transportation  men  in  early 


THE  TRANSATLANTIC  FERRY  39 

1919  when  they  realized  the  great  value  of  the  service  they 
were  rendering  to  their  comrades  of  the  expedition  and  to  the 
country  at  large.  When  it  bore  into  their  consciousness  that 
they  were  exceeding  all  expectations  in  delivering  troops  from 
France  to  the  United  States,  they  fell  to  with  a  spirit  unex- 
celled even  in  the  days  when  every  soldier  set  down  in  France 
was  so  much  added  insurance  of  a  speedy  end  to  the  war.  Ship 
vied  with  ship  to  cut  down  steaming  time,  and  the  ports  com- 
peted with  each  other  in  dispatching  vessels  to  sea. 

Under  such  circumstances  all  records  for  shipping  efficiency 
fell.  In  1918,  with  every  energy  bent  upon  the  attainment  of 
maximum  efficiency,  the  average  turn-around,  or  round  voyage 
across  the  ocean  and  back,  of  the  American  troop  transports 
was  something  over  36  days.  In  1919  during  the  return  move- 
ment it  dropped  to  32.6  days. 

The  oil-burning  transport  Great  Northern^  which  was 
bought  outright  by  the  War  Department  in  the  spring  of  1918, 
proved  to  be  the  fleetest  thing  that  ever  plied  the  Atlantic. 
Leaving  Hoboken  on  June  24,  1919,  with  a  few  passengers,  a 
fews  days  later  she  landed  them  at  Brest,  took  on  2,999  troops 
by  moonlight,  and  recrossed  to  Hoboken — all  within  twelve 
days,  five  hours,  and  thirty  minutes.  No  other  vessel,  military 
or  commercial,  ever  equaled  this  speed.  The  Great  Northern 
also  established  the  record  of  eighteen  transatlantic  cycles  at 
the  average  rate  of  twenty-three  days  for  each;  and  in  the 
whole  war  enterprise  she  transported  more  troops  per  ton  of 
capacity  than  did  any  other  troopship.  She  was  closely  crowded 
for  honors,  however,  by  her  sister  ship  Northern  Pacific. 

The  vessels  alone  could  not  write  such  records  except 
through  the  cooperation  of  the  port  organizations  on  both 
sides  of  the  Atlantic.  Before  the  armistice  the  capacities  of  the 
ports,  especially  of  those  in  France,  were  a  sharper  limitation 
upon  the  expansion  of  American  power  at  the  front  than  was 
the  shortage  in  ocean  shipping.  After  the  armistice  the  im- 
provement in  shipping  efficiency  was  attained  largely  by  speed- 
ing up  the  loading  and  unloading  of  transports  in  port.  On 
May  17  the  transport  Maui  at  Brest  took  aboard  3,612  troops 


40  DEMOBILIZATION 

and  sailed  for  America  in  three  hours  and  thirty-five  minutes 
after  arriving.  These  soldiers  had  to  be  carried  out  to  her  in 
lighters,  and  they  boarded  her  at  the  rate  of  sixty-five  a  min- 
ute. On  the  same  day  the  transport  Cape  May,  one  of  the  con- 
verted cargo  vessels,  arrived  at  Bordeaux  and  sailed  on  the 
same  tide  with  a  load  of  1,928  troops,  having  been  dispatched 
in  one  hour  and  nineteen  minutes.  These  were  extreme  in- 
stances, but  they  were  indicative  of  the  efficiency  of  the  port 
machinery. 

At  first  the  Transportation  Service  would  fix  no  schedule 
for  the  return  of  the  expedition,  except  the  general  one  that  it 
hoped  to  bring  back  the  last  man  before  January  1,  1920.  By 
the  beginning  of  spring,  1919,  the  situation  looked  so  much 
better  that  the  Service  brought  out  a  schedule  showing  the 
probable  troop-carrying  capacity  available  in  the  French  ports 
by  months,  and  estimating  this  capacity  for  several  months 
ahead.  The  schedule  promised  a  gradual  increase  until  the 
shipping  reached  a  goal  of  250,000  embarkations  a  month.  On 
the  basis  of  this  schedule  the  command  of  the  A.  E.  F.  fixed 
priorities  for  embarkation  and  published  both  the  schedule  and 
priority  dates,  to  the  excitement  of  the  men  of  the  expedition, 
most  of  whom  were  then  still  in  France.  To  be  sure,  the  authori- 
ties promised  nothing  definitely  and  informed  the  soldiers  that 
the  schedule  would  be  met  "if  practicable" ;  yet  the  men  of  the 
A.  E.  F.  banked  on  the  Transportation  Service  to  fulfill  its 
predictions. 

The  goal  of  250,000  embarkations  a  month  was  the  extreme 
maximum  which  the  Service  thought  it  might  attain  if  every- 
thing went  right.  Yet  three  months  later,  when  embarkations 
approached  400,000,  the  goal  had  been  passed  by  50  per  cent. 
The  actual  performance  brought  300,000  overseas  soldiers 
home  two  months  ahead  of  schedule,  and  300,000  others  beat 
the  schedule  by  one  month.  Here  was  the  equivalent  of 
900,000  men  returned  and  discharged  from  service  one  month 
earlier  than  the  nation  had  any  reason  to  expect.  The  cost  of 
maintaining  such  a  force  in  arms  for  one  month  is  approxi- 


THE  TRANSATLANTIC  FERRY  41 

mately  $66,000,000,  a  saving  which  must  be  set  down  to  the 
credit  of  the  administration  that  made  it  possible. 

The  days  spent  at  sea  by  the  returning  troops  were  not  time 
wasted.  Although  the  embarkation  officers  in  France  did  their 
best  to  send  out  with  each  soldier  a  complete  record  of  his 
service,  in  the  press  of  the  work  it  was  not  always  possible  to 
attain  this  ideal.  It  was  unjust  to  hold  back  a  soldier  from  em- 
barkation because  his  records  were  incomplete;  yet  before  he 
could  secure  his  discharge  his  papers  had  to  be  in  perfect  shape. 
The  Transportation  Service,  through  its  debarkation  camps  in 
the  United  States,  took  it  upon  itself  to  perfect  the  individual 
records  of  the  soldiers,  and  it  did  most  of  this  work  on  the 
ships  at  sea.  In  special  schools  at  Hoboken  and  Newport  News 
the  Service  trained  a  force  of  traveling  personnel  adjutants  for 
assignment  to  the  transports.  As  soon  as  a  troopship  started 
out  from  France  the  personnel  adjutant  aboard  opened  an 
office,  and  from  that  moment  until  the  ship  docked  he  was  busy 
from  morning  to  night  smoothing  up  the  service  records.  He 
also  compiled  the  papers  which  the  debarkation  camps  would 
need  and  instructed  the  troops  in  the  procedure  to  be  followed 
after  landing. 

Unexpectedly,  the  Transportation  Service  found  itself 
obliged  to  bring  home  in  first-class  accommodations  many  more 
persons  than  it  had  carried  to  Europe  in  that  style.  Thousands 
of  officers  had  crossed  before  the  armistice  in  commercial  liners, 
and  so  had  crowds  of  red  cross  and  other  welfare  workers. 
Numerous  soldiers  had  acquired  wives  in  Europe.  Military 
regulation  gave  these  women  and  their  husbands  accompany- 
ing them  the  right  to  occupy  first-class  quarters  on  trans- 
ports. After  the  armistice  several  congressional  committees  and 
hundreds  of  experts  employed  by  the  Government  in  the  peace 
negotiations  traveled  first-class  on  the  transports  in  both  direc- 
tions. The  result  was  that  on  July  1,  1919,  at  the  ports  in 
France  awaiting  first-class  transportation  to  America  there 
were  32,000  persons  over  and  above  the  capacity  of  such 
accommodations  in  sight  for  several  months  to  come.  To  have 
brought  them  all  back  in  the  state  to  which  they  were  entitled 


42  DEMOBILIZATION 

would  have  made  necessary  the  full  operation  of  the  entire 
transport  fleet  for  three  months  beyond  the  time  when  the 
return  movement  actually  ceased.  To  settle  the  matter  the 
Service  adopted  the  expedient  of  bringing  home  several  thou- 
sand junior  officers  quartered  in  the  troop  spaces  of  certain  of 
the  larger  and  faster  vessels.  Although  some  outcry  arose  over 
this  treatment,  the  majority  of  the  officers  were  too  glad  to  get 
home  at  all  to  be  critical  of  the  mode  of  their  transportation. 

Not  a  man  of  the  2,000,000  passengers  lost  his  life  as  the 
result  of  marine  disaster  after  the  armistice.  The  worst  acci- 
dent occurred  shortly  after  midnight  on  January  1,  1919, 
when,  during  a  blinding  rainstorm,  the  great  transport  North- 
ern Pacific,  with  a  load  of  2,500  troops,  two- thirds  of  whom 
were  sick  and  wounded  men,  went  aground  on  the  Long  Island 
shore  near  the  entrance  to  New  York  harbor.  The  sea  was 
rough,  the  wind  making,  and  as  the  ship  turned  port  side  to  the 
beach  and  worked  up  on  the  sand,  pounding  heavily,  rescue 
for  the  time  was  impossible.  The  weather  was  cold,  the  ship's 
machinery  was  out  of  commission,  and  she  was  lightless  and 
unheated.  It  took  three  days  to  rescue  the  passengers;  yet,  de- 
spite the  severity  of  the  experience,  no  person  on  board  suf- 
fered seriously  from  it.  The  pounding  had  so  damaged  the 
ship's  hull  that  many  of  the  plates  had  to  be  renewed.  A  more 
serious  injury  was  a  broken  stern-post.  In  former  marine  prac- 
tice such  an  injury  meant  the  casting  of  a  new  post  in  steel. 
The  Navy,  as  in  the  instance  of  the  broken  machinery  in  the 
interned  German  ships,  resorted  to  the  electric  welding  torch 
for  repairing  the  broken  stern-post,  saving  several  months  in 
time  and  perhaps  $50,000  in  money. 

The  A.  E.  F.  sold  most  of  its  property  in  Europe.  The  cargo 
transports  brought  home  about  850,000  tons  of  military 
freight — a  small  fraction  of  the  property  held  by  the  expedi- 
tion at  the  time  of  the  armistice.  The  goods  were  sold  abroad  at 
a  loss,  the  average  recovery  being  considerably  under  that  re- 
ceived from  the  sale  of  similar  goods  in  the  United  States.  Yet 
it  was  good  policy  to  do  what  was  done.  Europe  needed  the 
supplies  and  we  needed  the  ship-space  for  other  purposes.  If 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 


SAILING  DAY  AT  ST.  NAZAIRE 


WiB 


rif  f 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

TRANSPORT  MAUI  LOADING  AT  ST.  NAZAIRE 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 


SOUVENIRS  OF  HIS  SERVICE 


Photo  by  Signal  Coi  t>. 


EMBARKING  AT  ST.  NAZAIRE 


THE  TRANSATLANTIC  FERRY  43 

the  materials  had  been  returned  to  the  United  States  for  sale, 
out  of  the  proceeds  would  have  had  to  be  deducted  the  trans- 
portation cost;  and  the  Government  was  little,  if  anything, 
out  of  pocket  by  the  transaction. 

Among  the  materials  freighted  home  were  100,000  tons  of 
road-making  machinery.  This  the  War  Department  turned 
over  to  the  Department  of  Agriculture  to  be  used  in  the  con- 
struction of  highways  in  the  United  States.  The  cargo  trans- 
ports also  brought  back  large  ordnance  stores,  principally 
artillery,  much  of  it  of  British  and  French  manufacture.  The 
shipments  included  a  large  number  of  captured  German 
cannon,  brought  back  for  distribution  among  American  com- 
munities as  war  trophies. 

While  the  returning  troop  movement  was  at  its  height  the 
Transportation  Service  was  winding  up  its  war  business  and 
returning  to  a  permanent  peace  footing.  This  program  con- 
sisted principally  of  disposing  of  its  vessels  and  its  shore 
establishments.  On  November  11,  1918,  the  Service  was  oper- 
ating 580  vessels  with  a  total  deadweight  of  nearly  4,000,000 
tons.  At  the  end  of  1919  the  army  fleet  consisted  of  only  the 
few  transports  actually  owned  by  the  Government  through 
purchase,  construction,  or  seizure  from  Germany  or  Austria. 

Most  of  its  vessels  the  Army  held  under  charter  from  pri- 
vate owners.  The  best  interests  of  the  United  States  required 
the  return  of  these  ships  to  their  ownership  just  as  soon  as  the 
Army  could  do  without  them.  The  cargo  boats  were  first  to  go. 
In  February,  1919,  the  Transportation  Service  began  turn- 
ing them  back — redelivering  them,  it  was  called — at  the  rate 
of  three  ships  a  day.  In  July,  when  the  peak  of  the  overseas 
troop  movement  had  passed,  the  Service  began  disposing  of  its 
chartered  troopships  (including  the  converted  cargo  trans- 
ports), redelivering  the  last  of  them  in  December. 

The  Government  faced  tremendous  costs  in  these  trans- 
actions. The  charters  provided  that  the  Army  must  restore  the 
shipping  to  its  owners  in  its  original  condition,  ordinary  wear 
and  tear  excepted.  Nearly  every  ship  had  been  remodeled  to  a 
greater  or  less  extent  to  make  it  more  serviceable  to  the  Arniy. 


44  DEMOBILIZATION 

All  the  domestic  shipyards  and  repair  yards  were  glutted  with 
work,  and  it  was  evident  that  it  would  be  a  long  time  be- 
fore the  Transportation  Service  could  recondition  the  vessels. 
Meanwhile  the  Service  would  have  to  maintain  all  of  this  idle 
shipping  at  a  heavy  continuing  expense. 

Instead  of  reconditioning  the  ships,  therefore,  the  Trans- 
portation Service  adopted  the  policy  of  returning  vessels  as 
they  were,  at  the  same  time  compensating  the  owners  with 
lump-sum  settlements  for  damage  done  by  war  service.  In 
most  instances  the  owners  were  glad  enough  to  accept  such  an 
arrangement.  To  protect  the  Government  in  the  settlements, 
joint  boards  of  vessel  survey,  each  consisting  of  an  army,  a 
navy,  and  a  United  States  shipping  board  official,  were  set 
up  at  all  the  ports  where  ships  were  to  be  redelivered.  Expert 
marine  surveyors  under  their  direction  made  detailed  exami- 
nations of  all  the  ships.  With  these  surveys  in  hand,  and  with 
the  complete  history  of  each  ship  and  of  the  service  it  had 
undergone  while  in  the  War  Department's  possession,  the  sur- 
vey boards  were  able  to  arrive  at  a  close  estimate  of  the 
amount  of  the  Government's  financial  liability  in  each  case. 
The  owners  also  employed  their  expert  surveyors,  and  out  of 
the  two  examinations  grew  negotiations  which  arrived  at 
compromise  settlements. 

In  December,  1918,  the  Service  redelivered  ships  of  ap- 
proximately 189,000  deadweight  tons.  In  January  the  rede- 
livered ships  aggregated  461,000  deadweight  tons;  in  Febru- 
ary, 470,000;  and  in  March  occurred  the  heaviest  redelivery, 
amounting  to  approximately  532,000  deadweight  tons.  Rede- 
liveries crossed  the  two-million-deadweight-ton  mark  shortly 
after  the  middle  of  April.  By  June  most  of  the  cargo  transports 
had  been  restored  to  their  owners,  except  those  which  had  been 
converted  into  troop  carriers.  On  June  1 5  the  Army  began  dis- 
pensing with  the  use  of  battleships  and  cruisers,  the  last  of 
the  twenty- four  being  withdrawn  on  August  1.  The  break-up 
of  the  troop  fleet  began  in  earnest  on  August  1,  and  by  the 
first  anniversary  of  the  armistice  most  of  the  chartered  troop- 
ships had  gone  back  to  commercial  work. 


THE  TRANSATLANTIC  FERRY  45 

Many  questions  of  admiralty  law  arose  in  connection  with 
the  restoration  of  the  transports  to  the  merchant  marine.  The 
legal  branch  of  the  Transportation  Service  on  the  day  of  the 
armistice  consisted  of  but  two  lawyers.  By  that  time  a  large 
number  of  maritime  claims  awaiting  adjudication  had  accumu- 
lated, and  it  was  recognized  that  such  claims  would  multiply 
during  the  progress  of  negotiations  leading  to  the  redelivery  of 
the  vessels.  With  much  difficulty  the  Service  built  up  a  force 
of  twenty  admiralty  lawyers.  In  fact,  the  War  Department, 
after  the  armistice,  was  so  badly  in  need  of  lawyers  for  use  in 
the  liquidation  of  war  business,  that  for  several  months  it  was 
forced  to  maintain  the  rule  that  no  man  of  legal  training 
should  be  discharged  from  the  military  service. 

In  breaking  up  the  fleet  of  troop  transports  the  Transporta- 
tion Service  found  opportunity  to  create  for  the  War  Depart- 
ment a  large  permanent  reserve  of  troopships  without  expense 
to  the  Government  for  their  maintenance.  The  German  and 
Austrian  ships  seized  by  the  Government  at  the  outset  of  the 
war  became  in  large  part  the  property  of  the  Army.  Most  of 
these  vessels  were  admirably  adapted  to  war  service,  but  they 
were  too  large  and  too  costly  in  operation  to  justify  their 
continuance  in  the  transport  service  of  the  peace-time  estab- 
lishment. Consequently  the  Transportation  Service  turned 
thirteen  of  them  over  to  the  Shipping  Board  under  an  agree- 
ment providing  for  their  charter  to  private  operators,  subject 
to  their  recall  by  the  Army  in  the  event  of  another  war.  These 
ships  can  accommodate  approximately  50,000  troops  at  once. 
All  of  the  special  military  fittings  have  been  classified  and 
stored  away  ready  for  use  again,  if  it  ever  becomes  necessary. 

When  the  war  traffic  ended,  the  Transportation  Service 
found  itself  in  possession  of  enormous  port  facilities.  Prior  to 
the  armistice  the  Government  had  seized  or  leased  over  seventy 
steamship  piers  at  various  Atlantic  and  Gulf  ports;  but  even 
such  facilities  being  entirely  inadequate  to  the  vast  amount  of 
shipping  contemplated,  the  Government  began  the  construc- 
tion of  seven  great  port  bases  located  at  Boston,  Brooklyn, 
Port  Newark,  Philadelphia,  Norfolk,  Charleston,  and  New 


46  DEMOBILIZATION 

Orleans.  Not  one  of  these  projects  was  complete  on  November 
1 1.  One  of  the  early  demobilization  questions  to  be  settled  was 
what  to  do  with  these  installations.  Should  the  Government 
abandon  them  and  set  down  as  loss  the  millions  spent,  or  go 
ahead  with  their  erection  and  perhaps  make  the  whole  enter- 
prise profitable  by  leasing  the  facilities  to  American  com- 
merce? The  latter  course  was  chosen.  The  contractors  com- 
pleted the  construction  at  a  total  cost  of  $143,000,000.  As  the 
new  piers  became  ready  for  use  the  Transportation  Service 
turned  back  its  leased  piers  to  their  owners.  Then,  as  the  mili- 
tary traffic  dwindled,  the  space  in  the  base  terminals  was 
leased  to  private  ship  operators.  These  terminals,  among  the 
largest  and  finest  in  the  United  States,  are  now  rendering  an 
important  service  to  our  foreign  trade,  but  on  terms  ensuring 
their  instant  availability  to  the  Government  in  the  event  of  a 
future  emergency.* 

*  In  the  spring  of  1919  the  Transportation  Service  brought  back  to  America 
from  Archangel  the  American  troops,  about  4,500  in  number,  sent  to  northern 
Russia  in  September,  1918,  to  combat  the  Bolsheviki.  It  also,  in  late  1919  and 
early  1920,  transported  from  Vladivostok  to  American  Pacific  ports  about 
10,000  American  troops  who  had  been  sent  to  Siberia  at  different  times  to  aid 
Czecho-Slovak,  Japanese,  and  other  Allied  forces  in  operations  against  Ger- 
man and  Austrian  troops  aiding  the  hostile  native  Russians  in  Siberia.  In  1920 
the  Transportation  Service,  acting  as  an  independent  contractor,  undertook  to 
repatriate  30,000  of  the  Czecho-Slovak  Siberian  troops  cut  off  from  escape  to 
the  Balkans  by  the  successes  of  the  Bolsheviki  in  southern  Russia.  To  the 
government  of  Czecho-Slovakia  the  Service  named  the  price  of  $12,000,000  for 
this  work,  a  price  criticized  in  this  country  as  too  low.  The  last  of  the  30,000 
Czecho-Slovaks  were  landed  at  Trieste  about  January  1,  1921,  and  the  whole 
job  had  been  carried  through  at  a  cost  of  approximately  $8,000,000.  The  Service 
employed  twelve  U.  S.  transports  for  one  or  more  trips  in  the  movement  of 
the  Czech  expedition,  and  two  of  them — the  America  and  the  President  Grant, 
both  ex-German  liners — circumnavigated  the  globe  in  the  process  of  the  work, 
proceeding  from  New  York  to  Vladivostok  via  Panama  and  thence  to  Trieste 
via  the  Indian  Ocean  and  the  Suez  Canal,  and  from  Trieste  to  New  York  via 
Gibraltar.  The  Czechs  traveled  under  American  military  discipline  with  what 
that  implies  in  cleanliness  and  sanitation,  and  therefore  moved  without  the 
epidemics  of  disease  that  have  usually  accompanied  the  progress  of  Balkan 
forces. 


CHAPTER  IV 
EBB  TIDE 

BEFORE  the  American  Expeditionary  Forces  could  be 
disbanded  in  this  country  it  was  necessary  for  the 
training  camps,  most  of  which  were  to  become  demobi- 
lization centers  after  the  armistice,  to  be  evacuated  by  the 
home  forces  occupying  them.  The  fluvial  system  leading  into 
that  sea  of  humanity  which  we  knew  as  the  A.  E.  F. — main 
river  crossing  the  ocean,  chief  tributaries  leading  up  to  the 
ports  in  this  country,  beyond  them  their  branch  creeks  and 
brooks,  and  the  rills  at  the  sources — was  running  bank-full  on 
the  day  of  the  armistice.  Demobilization,  which  inverted  many 
of  the  processes  of  war  and  changed  familiar  names  into  their 
antonyms,  abruptly  reversed  the  direction  of  troop-flow,  as  if 
some  tremendous  power  had  uplifted  the  reservoir  and  the 
mouth  of  the  main  stream  in  France  above  the  ultimate  sources 
in  this  country.  Before  the  expeditionary  sea  could  drain  out, 
the  home  channels  of  troop  supply  had  to  discharge  their 
contents  into  the  nimbus  of  civilian  life. 

The  process  of  dissolution  began  within  the  hour  in  which 
the  news  of  peace  came  to  Washington.  It  happened  that 
November  1 1  was  the  first  of  five  days  during  which  the  Army 
planned  to  absorb  250,000  soldiers  inducted  into  service  under 
the  terms  of  the  Selective  Service  Act.  Although  it  was  evident 
that  an  armistice  was  at  hand,  the  Railroad  Administration 
went  ahead  with  preparations  for  the  transportation  of  these 
men  to  the  training  camps,  and  even  dispatched  the  draft 
trains  on  the  morning  of  November  1 1  to  pick  up  the  selec- 
tives,  although  the  morning  newspapers  had  announced  that 
the  armistice  was  indisputably  to  begin  at  eleven  o'clock  in 


48  DEMOBILIZATION 

France.  The  only  preparation  looking  toward  demobilization 
had  been  to  set  up  telephone  and  telegraph  circuits  over  which 
the  officials  in  Washington  could  stop  and  turn  back  the  troop 
trains  in  a  minimum  of  time.  Immediately  after  receiving  Gen- 
eral Pershing's  message  announcing  the  start  of  the  amiistice, 
the  Secretary  of  War  notified  the  Troop-Movement  Section 
of  the  Railroad  Administration  to  stop  the  draft  trains.  This 
was  done  within  an  hour,  although  the  trains  were  then  in 
operation  in  every  section  of  the  United  States,  Some  thou- 
sands of  young  men  who  had  taken  the  oath  of  allegiance  that 
morning,  and  who  at  the  approach  of  noon  were  on  troop 
trains  proceeding  to  military  camps,  found  themselves  back  at 
home,  civilians  once  more,  before  the  embers  of  the  celebrating 
bonfires  had  died  out  that  night. 

Hard  on  their  heels  came  the  hundreds  of  thousands  of  sol- 
diers who  made  up  the  combat  divisions  in  training  in  the 
United  States.  These  were  the  men  last  to  don  the  uniform — 
men  who  were  only  partially  trained,  and  who  could  be  of  no 
service  to  the  War  Department  in  the  activities  of  demobiliza- 
tion. Their  disbandment  was  not  a  difficult  undertaking.  They 
had  been  in  the  service  so  short  a  time  that  there  were  no  com- 
plications of  back  pay  and  incomplete  records  to  hinder  their 
discharge.  Moreover,  they  were  geographically  homogeneous — 
i.e.^  their  homes  were  generally  in  the  regions  surrounding  the 
training  camps — and  therefore  their  demobilization  brought 
about  no  problem  in  transportation.  As  a  rule  they  were  paid 
off  and  discharged  at  their  training  camps  and  allowed  to  make 
their  way  to  their  homes. 

Quite  apart  from  the  divisional  troops,  there  was  another 
great  body  of  soldiers  in  the  United  States  on  the  day  of  the 
armistice.  These  were  men  undergoing  training  in  special 
camps,  such  as  those  of  the  Air  Service  and  the  Quartermaster 
Corps,  and  also  the  troops  engaged  in  maintaining  the  great 
war  establishment  in  the  United  States.  The  demobilization 
of  these  men  was  more  difficult.  It  was  for  them  in  the  first 
place  that  the  War  Department  set  up  the  demobilization 
system  which  was  to  be  seen  in  the  perfection  of  operation 


EBB  TIDE  49 

later  on  when  the  A.  E.  F.  began  reaching  the  United  States 
en  masse. 

Soon  after  the  armistice  the  War  Department  established 
by  order  a  system  of  thirty-three  demobilization  camps,  or 
centers,  as  they  were  called.  In  large  part  these  centers  were 
former  training  camps.  Practically  all  the  National  Army 
cantonments  and  some  of  the  National  Guard  camps  were  so 
used.  Other  military  posts  and  stations  were  added  so  as  to 
distribute  the  demobilization  centers  evenly  throughout  the 
country  according  to  the  distribution  of  population.  The  War 
Department's  policy  was  to  discharge  soldiers  in  as  close 
proximity  as  possible  to  their  former  places  of  residence. 

The  special  troops  on  duty  in  this  country  lacked  homo- 
geneity in  the  regional  origin  of  the  members  of  the  various 
units.  Many  of  the  organizations  were  composed  entirely  of 
men  chosen  because  of  special  aptitude  for  special  service. 
Single  units  were  therefore  made  up  of  men  from  widely 
separated  parts  of  the  United  States.  When  the  time  came  to 
disperse  these  troops  it  was  found  impossible  to  send  the  units 
intact  to  demobilization  centers  and  there  to  disband  them, 
except  at  a  great  waste  of  transportation.  Throughout  the 
whole  activity  the  War  Department  husbanded  transporta- 
tion. Before  the  armistice  it  had  been  the  general  policy  to 
move  men  always  to  the  eastward,  since  east  was  forward. 
The  armistice  inverted  the  policy;  and  in  order  to  avoid  ex- 
pensive duplication  of  travel,  the  Army  in  assembling  its  de- 
mobilization units  moved  its  men  always  essentially  westward 
until  at  length  they  reached  the  camps  where  they  were  to  be 
discharged. 

Throughout  the  winter  of  1918-1919  the  disintegration  of 
the  home  forces  proceeded  rapidly,  as  the  great  subordinate 
services  of  the  Army  tapered  off  their  war  activities  and  re- 
leased their  men.  One  or  two  of  the  services,  such  as  the  Medi- 
cal Department  and  the  Motor  Transport  Corps,  held  on  to 
their  troops  for  a  few  months  in  order  to  carry  out  necessary 
duties  connected  with  the  disbanding  of  the  Army  and  the 
restoration  of  the  military  establishment  to  a  peace  footing; 


50  DEMOBILIZATION 

but  the  others,  such  as  the  Air  Service,  the  Signal  Corps,  the 
Corps  of  Engineers,  and  the  Quartermaster  Corps,  reduced 
strength  as  rapidly  as  the  country  could  absorb  the  men.  These 
men  lost  their  unit  identity  as  they  proceeded  toward  the  de- 
mobilization centers  and  finally  found  themselves  once  more 
grouped  with  their  neighbors,  regardless  of  what  service  any 
of  them  had  performed. 

By  the  end  of  February,  1919,  more  than  1,600,000  officers 
and  enlisted  men  had  been  discharged  from  the  Army.  At  that 
time  only  about  300,000  of  the  expeditionary  troops  had 
reached  the  United  States.  The  great  body  of  the  A.  E.  F.  was 
still  to  come,  but  the  demobilization  centers  in  the  United 
States  were  empty  and  ready  for  it. 

The  policy  of  discharging  troops  at  centers  adjacent  to  their 
homes  rested  upon  a  sound  foundation.  As  the  country  faced 
the  demobilization  of  4,000,000  troops,  young  men  most  of 
whom  had  been  held  for  many  months  under  the  rigid  re- 
straints of  army  discipline,  there  was  a  widespread  apprehen- 
sion that  the  discharged  soldiers  might  congregate  in  the  larger 
cities  and  create  profound  economic  disturbances.  Upon  the 
War  Department  there  was  no  compulsion  of  law  to  transport 
the  troops  to  their  own  neighborhoods  before  discharging  them. 
Obviously  the  easy  and  convenient  thing  was  to  discharge 
them  wherever  they  happened  to  be — at  the  thousand  and  one 
camps  in  the  United  States,  or  at  the  Atlantic  ports  upon  their 
arrival  from  France — discharge  them  there,  pay  them  off,  and 
so  farewell  to  them.  Such,  in  fact,  had  been  army  procedure  be- 
fore the  World  War.  The  Army  discharged  its  men  at  the  posts 
where  they  were  serving  and  paid  to  them  the  travel  allow- 
ances granted  by  law.  Whether  they  used  their  money  to  pay 
for  actual  transportation  home  was  no  concern  of  the  Army's. 
They  were  all  free,  and  most  of  them  white  and  twenty-one. 
As  long  as  discharges  were  relatively  few  this  procedure  had 
no  effect  upon  the  economic  life  of  the  nation.  But  what 
would  have  been  the  result  if  the  War  Department  had  con- 
tinued this  practice  when  disbanding  the  4,000,000  troops  in 
uniform  on  the  day  of  the  armistice?  Most  of  them  would 


EBB  TIDE  51 

have  been  turned  loose  in  the  vicinity  of  the  large  cities  of  the 
United  States — more  than  1,000,000  of  them  at  New  York 
alone.  Their  pockets  would  have  been  crammed  with  money. 
Congress  by  special  enactment  raised  the  travel  allowance  for 
discharged  soldiers  to  five  cents  a  mile,  payable  for  the  dis- 
tance between  the  place  of  discharge  and  the  soldier's  home, 
whether  the  entire  journey  could  be  accomplished  by  railroad 
or  not.  Congress  also  granted  a  bonus  of  $60  to  every  soldier — 
payable  also  at  discharge.  Thousands  of  soldiers,  when  they 
came  up  for  discharge,  were  entitled  to  back  pay.  Thus  every 
man  received  a  considerable  sum  of  money  with  his  discharge 
certificate,  and  for  the  overseas  soldier  this  sum  probably 
averaged  more  than  $100.  The  streets  of  our  cities  would  have 
been  thronged  with  such  men  during  the  first  six  months  of 
1919.  After  their  hardships  the  temptation  to  have  a  fling  at 
metropolitan  entertainments  would  have  been  well-nigh  irre- 
sistible. They  would  have  been  fair  game  for  gamblers  and 
sharp  practitioners.  The  rare  individual  might  have  bought 
his  ticket  and  gone  soberly  home,  but  the  majority  could 
scarcely  have  been  expected  to  show  such  restraint.  In  a  little 
while,  pockets  that  had  jingled  with  money  would  have  been 
empty,  the  streets  would  have  been  crowded  with  stranded 
soldiers,  and  the  burdened  municipalities  would  have  had  to 
face  a  severe  civic  problem. 

This  was  what  the  War  Department  sought  to  avoid,  and 
what  it  did  avoid,  by  its  demobilization  policy.  There  was 
also  another  consideration — that  of  financial  economy.  The 
War  Department  could  carry  troops  at  a  cost  of  much  less 
than  five  cents  a  mile  per  capita.  Therefore,  by  distributing 
the  Army  about  the  country  and  discharging  every  man  within 
his  own  native  section  the  War  Department  was  able  to  save 
millions  of  dollars  which  otherwise  would  have  been  paid  out 
in  mileage  allowances. 

The  good  offices  of  the  Government  to  the  demobilized  sol- 
dier did  not  end  when  the  War  Department  had  paid  him  his 
money  and  discharged  him.  As  a  special  inducement  to  de- 
mobilized soldiers  not  to  linger  in  the  communities  near  the 


52  DEMOBILIZATION 

demobilization  centers,  the  United  States  Railroad  Adminis- 
tration made  a  special  travel  rate  to  them  of  two  cents  a  mile. 
In  order  to  secure  the  cut  rate,  however,  the  soldier  had  to  buy 
his  ticket  within  twenty-four  hours  after  receiving  his  dis- 
charge. Thus  it  was  to  his  direct  financial  advantage  to  go 
home  at  once.  Nor  did  the  Railroad  Administration  permit 
him  to  overlook  the  opportunity.  All  the  principal  demobiliza- 
tion centers  had  their  own  railway  terminals,  from  which  spe- 
cial trains  for  discharged  soldiers  departed  at  intervals.  The 
Railroad  Administration  set  up  railway  ticket  booths  in  the 
offices  of  the  camp  finance  officers,  so  that  each  newly  dis- 
charged man,  as  he  turned  away  from  the  disbursing  window 
with  his  money  in  his  hand,  faced  the  railway  ticket  booth. 
At  his  elbow  were  Red  Cross,  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  and  other  camp 
welfare  workers  to  urge  him  to  buy  his  railway  ticket  at  once 
and  leave  on  the  first  train.  The  path  of  least  resistance  led 
straight  home,  and  he  was  indeed  a  headstrong  individual  who 
did  not  follow  it.  As  a  result  of  the  whole  system  the  demobi- 
lization of  the  Army  went  through  without  any  trouble  at  all. 
The  policy  had  an  effect  upon  the  mode  of  troop  travel  that 
was  to  be  observed  even  beyond  the  ports  of  embarkation  in 
France.  The  original  plan  had  been  to  bring  all  the  expedi- 
tionary divisions  back  to  the  camps  in  which  they  had  been 
organized  and  trained,  and  there  to  disband  them.  There 
seemed  to  be  nothing  in  the  way  of  so  simple  a  solution  of  the 
problem.  In  organizing  the  divisions  in  the  first  place,  it  had 
been  the  policy,  to  which  there  were  but  few  exceptions,  to 
create  divisions  of  men  originating  in  the  territory  contiguous 
to  each  training  camp.  As  the  divisions  started  for  France  they 
possessed  definite  territorial  identity;  and  the  divisional  names 
which  they  commonly  adopted  for  themselves — the  New  Eng- 
land Division,  the  Sunset  Division,  the  Buckeye  Division,  the 
Keystone  Division,  and  so  on — usually  indicated  the  geographi- 
cal origin  of  the  men  of  the  organizations.  It  was  thought  that, 
by  transporting  the  overseas  divisions  back  to  their  original 
training  camps  in  this  country,  each  would  be  placed  in  the 


EBB  TIDE  53 

demobilization  center  most  convenient  to  the  respective  homes 
of  its  soldiers. 

The  attempt  to  put  this  policy  into  practice  quickly  showed 
the  fallacy  of  it.  Immediately  it  was  discovered  that  the  com- 
position of  the  divisions  had  radically  changed  during  the  serv- 
ice in  France.  Men  had  died  in  battle,  fallen  sick,  been  trans- 
ferred to  other  organizations,  and  their  places  had  been  taken 
by  replacement  troops  shipped  from  the  United  States.  Whole 
divisions  had  been  rearranged.  In  the  autumn  of  1918  the 
expeditionary  divisions  were  no  longer  representative  of  sepa- 
rate districts  of  the  United  States;  each  was  in  effect  a  cross 
section  of  the  whole  of  America. 

One  of  the  first  organizations  to  come  back  from  France  was 
a  minor  unit,  a  company,  which  had  received  its  training  at 
Camp  Cody,  Texas.  The  unit  was  sent  to  Camp  Cody  for 
demobilization  and  discharge.  There  it  was  discovered  that, 
of  every  ten  men  who  had  joined  the  unit  when  it  was  in  train- 
ing, only  four  remained.  The  other  six  were  newcomers,  and 
to  reach  their  homes  they  had  to  travel  to  points  scattered 
from  Oregon  to  the  Atlantic  coast. 

Had  this  system  been  followed  throughout  the  disbanding 
of  the  expeditionary  units,  it  is  evident  that  it  would  have 
cost  the  Government  heavily  in  travel  allowances  paid  to  dis- 
charged soldiers,  without  saying  anything  about  the  tremen- 
dous traffic  burden  upon  the  railroads  of  the  country.  There 
was  nothing  to  do  but  to  break  up  the  whole  organization  of 
the  A.  E.  F.  before  sending  it  to  the  demobilization  centers, 
and  to  assemble  the  men  once  more  in  units  that  possessed 
geographical  identity. 

The  A.  E.  F.  received  instructions  to  attempt  this  break-up 
in  France — at  least  to  begin  it  there.  It  was  found  impossible 
to  regroup  the  services  of  supply  troops  to  any  extent,  because 
the  embarkation  ports  in  France,  at  which  the  supply  troops 
were  prepared  for  embarkation,  were  neither  organized  nor 
equipped  to  handle  such  a  difficult  work.  More  could  be  done 
with  the  divisional  troops  at  Le  Mans,  Thereafter,  whenever 
a  division  came  into  the  area  of  Le  Mans  those  soldiers  who 


54  DEMOBILIZATION 

had  joined  the  division  after  its  training  had  been  complete, 
and  who  did  not  live  in  the  district  centering  in  the  original 
training  camp  in  America,  were  detached  and  assembled  with 
neighbors  of  theirs  into  territorial  demobilization  units,  which 
became  known  as  overseas  casual  companies.  When  the  divi- 
sion itself  went  on  from  Le  Mans  to  the  ports  it  consisted  only 
of  the  remnant  of  charter  members  who  had  been  with  it  from 
the  outset. 

The  prescribed  size  of  an  overseas  casual  company  was  two 
officers  and  150  men,  but  it  was  seldom  convenient  to  send 
forth  companies  uniformly  organized.  Men  were  not  held 
waiting  in  France  until  casual  companies  could  be  built  up  to 
the  prescribed  size.  One  company  might  consist  of  fifty  sol- 
diers and  the  next  250,  according  to  circumstances  in  the 
embarkation  camp. 

The  principal  ports  of  embarkation  in  the  United  States 
before  the  armistice  had  been  New  York  (Hoboken),  Newport 
News,  and  Boston.  To  these,  in  the  system  for  receiving  the 
overseas  troops,  was  added  Charleston,  South  Carolina. 
Charleston  was  opened  as  a  port  of  debarkation  principally 
for  soldiers  who  were  proceeding  to  the  southern  demobiliza- 
tion centers.  The  entire  fleet  of  troop  transports  was  divided 
proportionately  among  these  ports,  the  greatest  number  oper- 
ating between  New  York  and  the  ports  in  France  and  the  next 
greatest  between  Newport  News  and  France.  In  the  main  each 
port  kept  its  own  fleet,  but  sometimes  it  became  necessary  to 
divert  a  vessel  at  sea  from  her  usual  course. 

Only  in  a  general  way  did  the  embarkation  authorities  in 
France  pay  attention  to  the  destinations  of  the  ships.  After 
each  loaded  transport  left  a  French  port  the  embarkation  offi- 
cials there  cabled  to  the  Transportation  Service  in  the  United 
States  a  full  description  of  the  troops  on  board.  If,  for  exam- 
ple, a  vessel  bound  for  Boston  were  carrying  a  preponderant 
number  of  soldiers  from  the  South,  the  Transportation  Service 
used  the  wireless  to  divert  the  transport  to  Newport  News  or 
Charleston. 

The  passenger  lists  cabled  to  the  United  States  often  con- 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

CASUALS  WAITING  TO  BOARD  SHIP  AT  ST.  NAZAIRE 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

BOARDING  EDWARD  LUCKENBACH,  CONVERTED  CARGO 
TRANSPORT 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 


EMBARKATION   AT   BORDEAUX 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 


LEFT  BEHIND 


EBB  TIDE  55 

tained  the  first  information  received  in  this  country  about  the 
departure  of  units  from  France.  There  was  no  news  more 
eagerly  awaited  by  the  people.  Cities  and  states  had  often 
made  elaborate  preparations  for  the  reception  of  their  overseas 
soldiers.  A  number  of  states  and  cities  sent  representatives  to 
the  ports  to  welcome  the  troops  home  at  the  gates  of  America. 
The  harbor  boat  of  the  New  York  Mayor's  Committee  of 
Welcome  was  busy  almost  every  day  taking  visiting  delega- 
tions down  the  bay  to  meet  the  incoming  transports.  In  the 
times  when  from  150,000  to  200,000  soldiers  were  on  the 
ocean  at  once  in  transports  bound  for  the  United  States,  keep- 
ing track  of  each  unit  became  difficult.  The  Transportation 
Service  set  up  a  news  and  information  bureau  through  which 
the  press  and  the  public  kept  in  touch  with  the  movements  of 
organizations  crossing  from  France. 

Upon  the  debarkation  camps  at  the  Atlantic  ports  fell  the 
chief  work  of  splitting  up  the  returning  expedition  into  de- 
mobilization units.  There  were  five  major  debarkation  camps — 
Merritt,  Mills,  and  Upton  at  New  York,  and  Stuart  and  Hill 
at  Newport  News — besides  numerous  smaller  centers  at  both 
ports.  At  the  height  of  the  return  movement  these  camps  were 
insufficient  to  accommodate  the  incoming  thousands,  and  the 
Transportation  Service  used  former  training  camps  as  debar- 
kation camps,  in  both  the  Hoboken  and  Chesapeake  districts. 
As  long  as  Boston  and  Charleston  acted  as  ports  of  debarka- 
tion they,  too,  made  use  of  neighboring  training  camps. 

Of  all  of  the  debarkation  camps.  Camp  Merritt  was  the 
largest.  In  it  were  to  be  observed  some  of  the  most  interest- 
ing processes  of  troop  demobilization.  It  was  the  principal 
camp  both  for  reception  of  overseas  casual  companies  and  for 
the  breaking-up  of  organized  units  and  the  formation  of  casual 
detachments  for  distribution  among  the  thirty-three  demobi- 
lization centers. 

During  demobilization  Camp  Merritt  was  like  a  great  termi- 
nal post  office.  The  mail  consisted  of  bulk  consignments  of  sol- 
dier members  of  the  disintegrating  American  Expeditionary 
Forces.  It  was  the  task  of  the  post  office  to  sort  the  mail  for 


56  DEMOBILIZATION 

thirty-three  principal  destinations.  The  individual  soldiers 
were  thrown  into  receptacles  called  Hoboken  Casual  Com- 
panies, each,  when  filled  up,  consisting  of  two  officers  and  150 
men,  and  each  addressed  to  one  or  another  of  the  demobiliza- 
tion centers.  Each  bore  an  identifying  number,  and  the  num- 
bers ran  consecutively,  reaching  well  into  four  figures  before 
the  work  came  to  an  end. 

Special  trains  frequently  left  the  two  railroad  stations  which 
served  Camp  Merritt,  Sometimes  an  entire  train  would  be 
loaded  with  casual  companies  bound  for  the  same  center.  Other 
trains  were  made  up  of  special  cars  destined  for  different 
terminals.  In  the  camp  new  casual  companies  in  skeletal  form 
were  constantly  being  organized.  Those  scheduled  to  travel  to 
the  less  populous  sections  of  the  country  might  be  several  days 
in  filling  up  to  standard  strength.  Others  reached  full  size  in 
a  few  hours.  As  soon  as  a  casual  company  was  complete,  it  was 
dispatched  immediately  to  its  proper  demobilization  camp.  For 
several  months  in  the  spring  and  summer  of  1919  the  average 
interval  between  the  time  a  skeleton  company  was  formed  and 
the  time  it  was  dispatched  from  camp  was  less  than  twenty- 
four  hours. 

Before  the  armistice,  troops  which  had  been  inspected, 
equipped  for  the  overseas  voyage,  and  otherwise  prepared  at 
Camp  Merritt,  marched  east  from  the  camp  over  three  miles 
of  macadamized  highway  and  then  down  the  old  Cornwallis 
trail  descending  the  Palisades,  until  they  reached  the  little 
landing  on  the  Hudson  River  known  as  Alpine,  several  miles 
north  of  the  metropolitan  limits  of  New  York.  There  they 
boarded  ferry-boats  and  rode  on  them  directly  to  the  transport 
piers  in  the  North  River.  After  the  armistice,  soldiers  debark- 
ing at  the  piers  boarded  ferry-boats  at  the  pier  ends,  rode  up 
the  river  to  Alpine,  climbed  the  Palisades,  and  marched  to 
Camp  Merritt.  Those  bound  for  Camp  Mills  or  Camp  Upton 
took  ferry  to  the  Long  Island  Railroad  terminal  at  Long  Island 
City  on  the  East  River.  Those  ticketed  for  Camp  Dix  boarded 
trains  which  had  been  run  into  the  Hoboken  yard  on  the  spur 


EBB  TIDE  57 

track  constructed  there  by  the  Government  after  it  seized  the 
pier  property  from  Germany. 

At  the  debarkation  camps  the  Army  applied  its  final  pre- 
cautions against  the  importation  of  European  diseases  and 
insect  pests.  There  was  a  thorough  disinfection  of  all  clothing 
and  equipment,  and  each  principal  camp  maintained  a  delous- 
ing  plant.  However  clean  the  soldiers  might  have  been  when 
they  embarked  in  France,  it  was  always  possible  for  a  few  of 
them  to  become  infested  on  the  transports.  So  far  as  is  known, 
not  a  cootie  got  through  the  barrage  of  steam,  superheated  air, 
soap,  and  hot  water  laid  down  by  the  Army  at  both  ends  of 
the  transatlantic  ferry  route. 

Before  the  return  of  the  A.  E.  F.  was  well  under  way  an 
important  change  took  place  in  the  organization  of  the  official 
military  travel  bureau.  Before  the  armistice,  military  trans- 
portation had  been  in  the  hands  of  two  independent  war  de- 
partment agencies.  The  Inland  Traffic  Service  had  charge  of 
the  movements  of  men  and  supplies  by  rail  within  the  United 
States  and  up  to  the  ports  of  embarkation.  There  the  Embar- 
kation Service  received  both,  loaded  them  on  the  ships,  and  de- 
livered them  to  the  ports  in  France.  Beyond  those  points  the 
Quartermaster  Service  of  the  A.  E.  F.  was  in  charge  of  mili- 
tary traffic.  Both  the  Inland  Traffic  Service  and  the  Embarka- 
tion Service  were  branches  of  the  General  Staff  Division  of 
Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic. 

In  December,  1918,  the  Inland  Traffic  Service  and  the  Em- 
barkation Service  joined  to  form  a  new  branch  called  the 
Transportation  Service,  and  for  the  first  time  the  Army  had  a 
single  organization  in  charge  of  all  military  travel,  both  freight 
and  passenger,  on  this  side  of  the  piers  in  Europe.  General 
Hines  of  the  Embarkation  Service  became  chief  of  the  Trans- 
portation Service.  The  union  brought  about  a  coordination 
which  made  it  possible  for  a  limited  equipment  of  railway 
coaches  to  carry  troops  away  from  the  ports  of  debarkation  as 
fast  as  the  ships  delivered  them  there. 

As  a  rule,  the  overseas  men  did  not  travel  so  comfortably 
from  the  ports  of  debarkation  to  the  demobilization  centers  as 


58  DEMOBILIZATION 

they  had  ridden  when,  months  earlier,  they  had  traveled  from 
those  same  centers  up  to  the  ports  to  board  the  ships  for  France. 
The  conditions  of  military  transportation  were  different.  The 
equipment  of  railway  cars  at  the  Army's  disposal  was  limited. 
It  had  never  consisted  of  more  than  1,500  sleeping  cars — tour- 
ist sleepers  they  were,  made  by  removing  the  rugs  and  hang- 
ings from  first-class  Pullman  coaches.  These  1,500  cars,  in  full 
operation,  could  carry  less  than  50,000  men  at  one  time. 
Nevertheless,  although  before  the  armistice  the  Army  supplied 
railroad  transportation  to  over  8,000,000  men,  nearly  every 
one  who  traveled  at  night  slept  in  a  comfortable  berth.  Dur- 
ing that  period  practically  all  the  long-haul  travel  was  between 
the  training  camps  and  the  ports  of  embarkation.  The  forces  in 
America  proceeded  to  embarkation  by  divisions — camp  by 
camp.  Thus  it  was  possible  to  arrange  the  shipping  schedules 
to  allow  for  the  most  convenient  operation  of  the  military 
rolling  stock.  But  no  such  arrangement  was  possible  during 
demobilization.  The  system  of  splitting  up  the  overseas  units 
at  the  ports  in  this  country  and  distributing  their  men  accord- 
ing to  residential  origin  made  it  necessary  to  maintain  prac- 
tically continuous  train  service  between  the  various  Atlantic 
ports  and  the  thirty-three  demobilization  centers.  The  sleeping- 
car  equipment  was  not  nearly  large  enough  to  serve  in  such 
an  operation,  and  a  great  many  soldiers  rode  in  day  coaches 
halfway  across  the  continent.  They  did  not  grumble  too  much 
at  the  treatment.  It  was  better  than  riding  in  French  box  cars, 
at  any  rate,  and  after  all  they  were  getting  home. 

One  of  the  finest  accomplishments  of  military  transportation 
after  the  armistice  was  the  distribution  of  150,000  sick  and 
wounded  soldiers  of  the  A.  E.  F.  among  the  many  military 
hospitals  of  the  United  States.  The  Transportation  Service 
operated  six  hospital  ships  at  New  York.  These  vessels  took 
the  patients  from  the  general  debarkation  hospital  on  Ellis 
Island  and  carried  them  on  their  way  to  various  special  evacua- 
tion hospitals  in  the  New  York  metropolitan  district.  From 
there  they  were  sent  to  general  hospitals  throughout  the  country. 
The  Service  kept  six  hospital  trains  in  continuous  operation,  as 


EBB  TIDE  59 

well  as  about  250  hospital  cars.  No  such  movement  of  invalids 
was  ever  before  known  in  the  United  States. 

The  records  of  the  Transportation  Service  show  that  in  dis- 
banding the  Army  it  carried  over  7,000,000  military  passengers 
in  special  cars  and  trains.  The  average  journey  was  500  miles. 
Train  accidents  cost  the  lives  of  only  two  soldiers  and  injured 
only  seventeen.  This  high  degree  of  safety  was  largely  due  to 
the  fact  that  troop  trains  were  held  down  to  a  running  schedule 
of  twenty  miles  an  hour. 

The  whole  system  of  distribution  and  travel  would  have 
worked  almost  automatically  except  for  one  thing — the  victory 
parades.  Whenever  it  could  do  so  without  too  great  disruption 
of  the  system,  the  War  Department  yielded  to  the  desire  of 
communities  to  celebrate  with  parades  the  return  of  their  over- 
seas sons.  Nearly  200,000  troops  in  all  marched  in  more  than 
450  parades,  which  ranged  from  the  brief  processions  of  single 
companies  to  such  great  demonstrations  as  those  of  the  First 
Division  in  New  York  and  Washington  in  September,  1919- 

Six  parades  of  returning  overseas  troops  passed  under  the 
triumphal  arch  over  Fifth  Avenue  at  Madison  Square,  New 
York.  Of  these,  the  parades  of  the  Twenty-seventh  and 
Seventy-seventh  Divisions,  both  originally  composed  almost 
exclusively  of  New  York  men,  were  closest  to  the  metropolitan 
heart.  Part  of  the  Twenty-eighth  Division  paraded  in  Phila- 
delphia on  May  15,  1919.  The  Thirty-third  Division  paraded 
in  Chicago  in  three  sections  in  late  May  and  early  June. 

These  processions  were  but  preliminary  to  the  greatest  cele- 
bration of  all — the  one  which  occurred  when  the  First  Divi- 
sion, first  to  go  to  France,  last  to  come  back,  returned,  with 
General  John  J.  Pershing,  the  Commander-in-Chief  of  the 
American  Expeditionary  Forces,  at  its  head.  In  arranging  for 
the  parades  of  the  First  Division,  the  War  Department  deter- 
mined to  show  the  spectators  a  combat  division  in  full  field 
panoply — and  that  meant  equipping  it  with  its  transport  ani- 
mals. All  divisions  had  left  their  animals  in  France,  and  solely 
for  these  spectacles  the  Transportation  Service  assembled  in 
New  York  before  the  day  of  the  first  parade  several  thousand 


6o  DEMOBILIZATION 

horses  and  mules  secured  from  army  posts  as  far  west  as  Texas 
and  then  transported  to  New  York. 

The  First  Division  gathered  in  the  debarkation  camps  at 
New  York.  It  included  as  an  attached  unit  the  specially  trained 
drill  regiment  of  the  Third  Army  Corps.  So  augmented,  it  con- 
sisted of  nearly  24,000  men  and  their  wheeled  equipment  of 
artillery,  service  trains,  repair  shops,  bakeries,  kitchens,  and 
so  on,  the  motorized  equipment  alone  numbering  five  hundred 
trucks  and  sixty  motorcycles.  The  transportation  of  this  great 
unit  to  Washington  afforded  a  special  problem  that  would 
have  been  impossible  of  solution  by  any  organization  less  ex- 
pert than  the  one  which  had  administered  military  travel  for 
so  many  months  past.  There  were  no  facilities  at  Washington 
for  the  accommodation  of  such  a  number  of  troops,  and  there- 
fore it  was  necessary  to  hold  them  in  the  New  York  camps  and 
take  them  to  Washington  on  the  eve  of  the  parade  itself.  After 
the  New  York  appearance  of  the  Division  its  motor  fleet  was 
sent  over  the  highways  to  Washington,  the  vehicles  inciden- 
tally carrying  1,770  men  with  them.  The  freighting  to  Wash- 
ington of  the  animals  and  horse-drawn  vehicles,  including  the 
artillery,  began  immediately  after  the  New  York  parade  dis- 
banded and  continued  for  several  days.  The  twenty-two  trains 
carrying  the  foot  soldiers  all  arrived  in  Washington  during  the 
night  before  the  parade,  the  last  ones  just  in  time  to  allow 
their  passengers  to  find  their  places  in  the  procession. 

The  moving  spectacle  which  followed  gave  the  national 
capital  and,  through  the  newspaper  accounts,  the  country,  an 
approximation  of  the  Grand  Review  that  occurred  in  Wash- 
ington at  the  close  of  the  Civil  War.  For  four  hours  the  Divi- 
sion marched  between  throngs  such  as  Washington  ordinarily 
knows  only  when  a  President  is  inaugurated,  down  Pennsyl- 
vania Avenue,  past  the  Treasury  and  the  White  House  and 
the  reviewing  stand,  in  which  were  some  of  the  chief  uniformed 
and  civilian  dignitaries  of  the  Government,  including  General 
Pershing.  A  roaring  squadron  of  airplanes  skimmed  the  tree- 
tops  between  the  capitol  and  the  war  department  building; 
an  observation  balloon  swayed  in  air  above  the  White  House; 


Photo  by  Siynal   Corps 


HOME  AGAIN 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

WELCOMING  RETURNING  TROOPS  AT  HOBOKEN 


Photo   by  Air  Service 

FIRST  DIVISION  PARADING  ON  PENNSYLVANIA  AVENUE 


Photo  by  Air  Service 

VICTORY  ARCH  IN  WASHINGTON 


EBB  TIDE  61 

and  as  the  steady  procession  passed — mile  after  mile  of  trig 
ranks,  bronzed  faces,  showy  war  medals  and  regimental  decora- 
tions, burnished  caparisons,  regimental  bands,  field  guns, 
limbers  and  caissons,  ammunition  trucks,  quartermaster  supply 
trains,  ambulance  trains,  engineering  trains  with  strange  imple- 
ments mounted  upon  motor  trucks,  horse-drawn  carts  for  many 
purposes,  rolling  field  kitchens,  and  finally  the  jarring  tanks, 
their  caterpillar  treads  leaving  indelible  matrices  in  the  sun- 
warmed  asphalt — with  emotion  the  spectator  beheld  this  living 
presentment  of  the  power  which  America  had  exerted  in  the 
great  war. 


CHAPTER  V 
THE  PROCESS  OF  DISCHARGING  SOLDIERS 

FOUR  hours  after  the  First  Division  finished  parading  in 
Washington,  its  troops  were  in  Camp  Meade,  thirty 
miles  away,  where  the  "emergency"  soldiers  in  the  divi- 
sion's ranks  were  to  be  discharged.  There,  like  the  millions  who 
had  preceded  them  into  the  demobilization  centers,  they  fell 
into  the  hands  of  two  expert  crews,  each  competing  with  the 
other  in  speeding  up  the  processes  of  discharge  from  the  Army. 

The  two  principal  operations  in  the  discharge  of  a  soldier 
were  (i)  examining  him  physically  and  (2)  computing  how 
much  the  Government  owed  him  and  paying  over  to  him  the 
amount  determined.  These  two  activities  were  in  the  hands  of 
central  organizations  functioning  at  the  demobilization  cen- 
ters. The  preparation  of  the  soldier's  certificate  of  discharge 
and  of  the  papers  for  his  permanent  record,  to  be  retained  in 
the  government  files,  was  in  the  hands  of  his  company  officers. 

For  the  first  time  after  a  great  war  the  American  Army 
retained  a  complete  record  of  the  exact  physical  condition  of 
every  soldier  at  the  time  of  his  discharge.  Had  the  Army  done 
this  in  the  past,  doubtless  it  would  have  saved  the  Government 
much  trouble  and  expense  arising  from  fraudulent  claims  for 
alleged  physical  disability  arising  from  military  service.  The 
purpose  of  the  final  physical  examinations  at  the  camps  was 
not  only  to  give  the  Government  this  record,  but  also  to  dis- 
cover any  men  who  might  be  suffering  from  contagious  diseases 
or  from  infirmities  susceptible  of  cure  under  further  treatment 
in  the  army  hospitals.  The  Army  would  not  let  men  go  until 
the  Medical  Department  had  done  all  it  could  for  them. 

The  boards  of  physicians  and  surgeons  which  conducted  the 
examinations  were  made  up  of  specialists  in  seven  branches  of 
medicine,   including  dentistry.   As   each  soldier  entered  the 


PROCESS  OF  DISCHARGING  SOLDIERS       63 

examination  building,  he  was  first  taken  in  hand  by  officers 
who  explained  to  him  what  the  Government  would  do  in  the 
way  of  compensation  for  disabilities  incurred  in  the  Service 
and  who  urged  him  to  make  claim  for  any  disability  from 
which  he  knew  he  was  suffering.  For  this  purpose  he  received 
a  claim  form  to  fill  out.  He  then  passed  through  the  seven 
sections  of  the  examination;  and  if  this  scrutiny  disclosed  no 
disability,  and  if  he  had  claimed  none,  he  was  granted  a  clean 
bill  of  health  and  passed  on  to  the  pay  officers. 

The  degree  of  disability  was  expressed  in  percentage.  A 
rated  disability  of  50  per  cent  meant  that  in  the  opinion  of  the 
examiners  the  soldier's  earning  power  in  his  former  occupation 
had  been  decreased  by  half  by  reason  of  injury  or  infirmity 
incurred  in  the  military  service.  Under  the  law  the  Bureau  of 
War  Risk  Insurance  automatically  granted  compensation  to 
disabled  veterans  of  the  war  up  to  eighty  dollars  a  month  (for 
total  disability),  requiring  only  that  the  disabled  soldier  pre- 
pare his  claim  on  a  form  sent  to  him  by  the  Bureau  upon  its 
receipt  of  the  report  of  the  examining  board  at  the  demobiliza- 
tion center.  Disability  of  less  than  10  per  cent  was  not  com- 
pensatable  under  the  law,  and  so  the  examining  boards  certi- 
fied to  the  Bureau  of  War  Risk  Insurance  only  the  records  of 
disability  amounting  to  10  per  cent  or  more.* 

At  first  it  took  the  medical  boards  a  considerable  time  to 
give  examinations  to  large  units  of  troops  awaiting  discharge ; 
but  Washington  kept  putting  more  and  more  pressure  upon 
the  demobilization  centers  to  speed  up,  until  finally  the  flat 
order  went  forth  that  all  troops  arriving  at  a  camp  must  be 

*  The  disability  discovered  in  these  examinations  was  surprisingly  small, 
affecting  a  little  more  than  5  per  cent  of  the  soldiers  examined.  Since  the 
so-called  limited-service  men — soldiers  suffering  from  physical  disability  at 
the  time  of  their  induction  and  accepted  for  military  duties  with  the  proviso 
that  they  should  serve  in  capacities  where  their  physical  shortcomings  would 
not  impair  their  value  to  the  Government — since  these  men  also  went  to  the 
demobilization  centers  for  discharge,  it  is  evident  that,  to  show  a  true  picture 
of  the  physical  condition  of  the  Army  at  demobilization,  the  limited-service 
troops  must  be  subtracted  from  the  totals.  With  such  subtraction  made,  it  is 
estimated  that  less  than  5  per  cent  of  the  men  called  to  arms  and  accepted  for 
service  incurred  physical  disability  of  any  sort  by  reason  of  their  experience. 


64  DEMOBILIZATION 

put  through  to  discharge  within  forty-eight  hours  thereafter. 
Since  sometimes  the  greater  part  of  a  division  of  troops,  or 
even  a  whole  division,  reached  a  demobilization  camp  prac- 
tically at  once,  the  order  meant  day  and  night  work  for  the 
examiners,  until  they  had  cleared  away  the  accumulations  of 
men.  At  such  times  the  boards  raced  with  the  finance  crews, 
the  doctors  exulting  if  they  passed  men  faster  than  the  dis- 
bursing officers  could  make  out  the  pay  rolls,  and  the  latter 
crowing  when  they  could  twiddle  their  thumbs  and  wait  for 
men  to  come  from  the  examination  rooms. 

The  cash  settlement  between  Uncle  Sam  the  employer  and 
his  four  million  soldier  employees  was  a  transaction  much 
more  complicated  than  would  appear  at  first  glance.  There 
were  many  elements  to  be  considered  in  computing  the  final 
pay  of  a  soldier,  and  to  determine  these  elements  for  each 
man  of  the  four  million  the  pay  officers  had  to  make  a  com- 
plete search  of  the  records  each  time. 

The  records  were  often  voluminous.  The  private  soldier's 
base  pay  was  $30  a  month.  His  records  showed  when  he  was 
last  paid,  and  the  Government  owed  him  for  the  interval 
between  his  last  pay  day  and  the  date  of  his  discharge,  at  the 
rate  of  $30  a  month.  But  perhaps  he  had  been  deducting  a 
certain  amount  of  his  pay  each  month  as  an  allotment  to  his 
dependents.  He  could  deduct  up  to  $15  a  month,  and  the 
Government  would  match  him  dollar  for  dollar  when  it  paid 
the  allotment  to  his  dependents.  At  any  rate,  any  allotment 
was  deducted  from  his  final  pay,  too.  Was  he  insured  with  the 
War  Risk  Insurance  Bureau^  If  so,  the  pay  officer  deducted 
a  premium  from  each  month's  pay  due  him,  and  the  premium 
varied  with  each  man's  age.  Perhaps  he  had  purchased  a 
Liberty  Bond  through  the  War  Department.  In  that  event  the 
monthly  partial  payment  was  deducted.  Deductions  had  to 
be  made  for  sickness  incurred  not  in  line  of  duty,  or  to  fulfill 
penalties  imposed  by  courts-martial.  After  March  1,  1919, 
every  soldier  was  entitled  to  draw  a  bonus  of  $60,  and  this  was 
included  in  his  final  pay.  Finally  the  law  granted  him  a  mile- 
age allowance  at  the  rate  of  five  cents  a  mile  for  the  distance 


PROCESS  OF  DISCHARGING  SOLDIERS       65 

between  his  place  of  discharge  and  his  home.  And  this  did  not 
mean  the  distance  to  the  railroad  station  nearest  his  home,  but 
the  distance  clear  home,  to  his  front  door,  even  though  he 
lived  off  in  the  back  country  forty  miles  from  the  railroad. 
The  pay  officer  had  to  have  at  his  elbow,  not  only  the  tables 
of  railroad  distances,  but  also  complete  road  maps  of  the  dis- 
trict served  by  the  demobilization  center. 

It  should  be  remembered  that  pay  officers  were  personally 
responsible  for  errors  in  their  work,  and  if  the  Government 
chanced  to  lose  money  as  the  result  of  error,  the  unfortunate 
disbursing  officer  or  his  bondsmen  had  to  make  it  good.  In 
spite  of  the  many  elements  entering  into  the  pay  computa- 
tions, the  finance  crews  at  the  centers  grew  astonishingly  expert 
in  making  out  the  pay  rolls.  It  became  so  that  a  team  of  two 
pay  officers  could  enroll  names  on  the  pay  sheet  at  the  rate  of 
two  names  a  minute. 

To  accomplish  such  a  result  the  Director  of  Finance,  in 
whose  hands  eventually  centered  all  the  finance  activities  of 
the  War  Department,  swept  aside  hampering  regulations  and 
precedents  and  adopted  the  direct  methods  of  business.  This 
impatience  of  red  tape  was  not  better  shown  than  in  the  treat- 
ment of  wounded  men  in  the  American  hospitals.  The  regula- 
tions were  hard  and  fast  in  adherence  to  the  rule  that  a  soldier 
could  be  paid  only  upon  the  representations  of  facts  as  written 
into  his  service  records.  Wounded  men,  however,  picked  up 
unconscious  on  the  battle  field,  often  too  sick  for  months  there- 
after to  look  out  for  their  personal  affairs,  in  thousands  of 
instances  had  lost  their  service  records  altogether.  The  matter 
came  to  a  focus  in  early  1919  when  the  finance  officer  at 
Walter  Reed  Hospital  at  Washington  reported  that  there  were 
nearly  a  thousand  patients  in  that  institution  who  possessed 
no  records  at  all  to  show  what  the  Government  owed  them. 
The  Director  of  Finance  thereupon  issued  instructions  that 
they  and  all  other  wounded  men  in  the  domestic  hospitals 
should  be  paid  off  on  the  basis  of  their  sworn  affidavits  set- 
ting forth  the  amounts  owed  to  them  by  the  Government. 
The  finance  officer  at  Walter  Reed  Hospital  collected  the 


66  DEMOBILIZATION 

affidavits,  but,  feeling  his  personal  responsibility,  hesitated 
to  certify  the  pay  roll;  whereupon  the  Director  of  Finance 
showed  his  courage  by  certifying  it  himself,  thus  setting  a 
precedent  which  the  hospital  officers  were  willing  to  follow. 

That  was  one  departure  from  tradition.  A  more  important 
one,  because  it  concerned  more  men,  did  away  with  the  indi- 
vidual final  statements  which  all  soldiers  in  the  past  had  been 
required  to  make  when  coming  up  for  discharge.  The  final 
statement  was  an  elaborate  form  which  each  soldier  filled  out, 
at  the  cost  of  considerable  time  and  effort.  Moreover,  the  pay 
officers  could  not  work  rapidly  from  these  forms.  For  them 
was  substituted  the  final-payment  roll  which  served  for  an 
entire  company  of  men  and  which  could  be  made  up  quickly 
by  the  company  officers.  Working  with  individual  final  state- 
ments, a  certain  demobilization  center  had  been  able  to  dis- 
charge four  hundred  men  a  day.  As  soon  as  the  final-payment 
roll  was  adopted  the  same  crew  at  the  same  camp  was  able  to 
discharge  men  at  the  rate  of  fifteen  hundred  a  day. 

The  men  who  paid  off  the  demobilized  troops  at  the  camps 
were  trained  for  the  work  in  a  finance  service  school  estab- 
lished immediately  after  the  armistice  at  Camp  Meigs,  in  the 
District  of  Columbia.  The  school  graduated  some  250  experts 
in  army  camp  finance.  These  men  were  distributed  among  the 
demobilization  centers,  working  in  teams  of  two  men  each.  For 
a  long  time  the  work  of  discharging  the  Army  kept  these  teams 
at  work  from  dawn  until  late  at  night,  with  never  even  a 
Sunday  as  holiday. 

From  the  pay-roll  teams  the  certified  sheets  went  to  another 
set  of  finance  teams  for  "change-listing."  The  final  payments 
to  soldiers  were  made  in  cash.  The  "change-listers"  took  the 
pay  rolls  and  computed  precisely  how  many  bills  of  each 
denomination,  how  many  half-dollars,  how  many  quarters  and 
dimes  and  nickels  and  pennies,  it  would  require  to  pay  off  all 
the  men  without  requiring  one  of  them  to  make  change  at  the 
window.  The  aggregate  change  lists  went  to  the  camp  dis- 
bursing officer,  and  he  procured  the  cash  from  the  nearest 
bank.  The  banks  nearest  to  some  of  the  camps  were  miles  away 


^-^<:?^2* 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

OVERSEAS  TROOPS  ENTRAINING  AT  HOBOKEN 


Felix  J .  Koch  Photo 

VETERANS  DETRAINING  AT  CAMP  SHERMAN 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

DISCHARGED  SOLDIERS  RECEIVING  FINAL  PAY 


Felix  J.  Koch  Photo 

MAKING  OUT  DISCHARGE  CERTIFICATES 


PROCESS  OF  DISCHARGING  SOLDIERS       67 

through  desolate  country,  and  sometimes  a  disbursing  officer 
had  to  bring  back  in  his  automobile  as  much  as  a  million 
dollars  in  currency.  He  rode  under  the  escort  of  a  heavy  guard 
and  was  further  protected  by  armed  men  in  his  camp  office. 
Losses  incurred  through  robbery  were  insignificant. 

Every  morning  the  disbursing  officer  turned  over  to  his 
assistants  the  exact  quantity  of  bills  and  small  change  needed 
to  cover  the  payments  to  be  made  that  day.  The  men  reported 
to  the  pay  office  in  companies.  Their  officers  called  out  their 
names  one  by  one,  and  when  each  man  had  verified  his  cash 
he  received  his  discharge  certificate,  on  the  back  of  which  was 
endorsed  the  amount  of  money  just  paid  to  him  in  final  settle- 
ment. At  that  moment  he  was  no  longer  a  soldier.  He  could 
do  as  he  pleased  from  that  time  on,  but  he  usually  yielded 
to  the  good  influences  of  those  urging  him  to  proceed  directly 
to  his  home. 

The  Seventy-seventh  Division  was  paid  off  and  discharged 
at  Camp  Upton  in  two  days.  There  were  27,000  men  in  the 
division  as  it  reached  the  demobilization  camp.  The  problem 
of  the  finance  officers  was  simplified  by  the  fact  that  prac- 
tically all  of  the  men  resided  in  New  York  City,  which  made 
it  easy  to  compute  mileage.  Each  man  received  an  average  of 
$100,  including  the  bonus,  an  amount  which  is  probably  a  fair 
approximation  of  what  was  paid  to  the  average  overseas  soldier 
upon  discharge.  The  advantage  of  speed  in  demobilization  was 
not  all  to  the  soldier.  It  cost  about  two  dollars  a  day  to  main- 
tain a  private  soldier  in  the  Service.  Each  day's  delay,  there- 
fore, in  demobilizing  the  Seventy-seventh  Division  cost  the 
Government  $54,000. 

A  further  simplification  of  methods  resulted  in  promptness 
in  discharging  commissioned  officers.  The  disbursing  officer  at 
a  demobilization  camp  saw  all  officers  in  three  classes — those 
who  in  service  had  been  accountable  for  neither  government 
property  nor  money;  those  who  had  been  accountable  for  prop- 
erty only ;  and  those  who  had  been  in  possession  of  government 
funds.  The  officers  of  Class  1  could  be  paid  off  finally  at 
discharge;  but  the  accounts  of  accountable  officers  were  sub- 


68  DEMOBILIZATION 

ject  to  audit,  and  their  final  pay  was  withheld  until  these 
audits  were  made.  Inasmuch  as  officers  often  came  up  for  dis- 
charge with  two  or  three  months'  back  pay  due  them,  the  with- 
holding of  such  considerable  amounts  of  money  for  an  ex- 
tended period  imposed  a  hardship  upon  them.  Under  the  old 
system  it  would  have  been  a  long  time  before  all  of  the  dis- 
charged officers  could  have  received  their  final  pay.  In  fact, 
after  the  termination  of  every  previous  war  in  which  American 
emergency  troops  had  ever  engaged  it  was  a  long  time  before 
the  Government  finally  settled  the  pay  claims  of  the  account- 
able officers.  The  accumulation  of  officers'  accounts  in  the 
spring  of  1919  became  so  great  as  to  make  it  evident  that 
under  the  existing  plan  the  War  Department  would  be  a  dozen 
years  at  least  in  auditing  all  of  them;  which  meant — if  the 
old  audit  system  were  to  be  continued — that  it  would  be  1931 
before  some  of  the  World  War  officers  received  their  final  pay 
for  their  services. 

The  Director  of  Finance  determined  to  do  better  than  that. 
To  be  sure,  the  audit  of  the  property  accounts  was  required  by 
law;  but  instead  of  continuing  the  system  of  auditing  them 
in  Washington,  the  Director  of  Finance  arranged  for  a  force 
of  field  auditors  to  go  to  the  demobilization  centers  and  audit 
the  property  accounts  as  they  were  presented.  The  result  was 
that  the  officers  responsible  for  property  were  enabled  to  draw 
their  final  pay  with  their  discharge  certificates. 

Officers  responsible  for  government  money  occupied  a  dif- 
ferent status,  but  such  officers  were  relatively  few  in  number. 
The  former  plan  in  use  required  the  audit  of  their  accounts  by 
the  Treasury  Department,  and  it  was  evident  that  the  Treas- 
ury Department  would  be  a  year  or  more  in  making  these 
audits.  Meanwhile  none  of  the  discharged  officers  would  be 
able  to  draw  their  final  pay.  This  auditing  arrangement  was  a 
requirement,  not  of  law,  but  of  military  regulation,  which  the 
Director  of  Finance  was  able  to  sweep  aside,  paying  off  such 
officers  finally  upon  the  receipt  of  statements  from  them 
accounting  in  detail  for  the  money  which  they  had  handled. 
The  Government  risked  nothing  by  this  innovation,  because 


PROCESS  OF  DISCHARGING  SOLDIERS       69 

officers  accountable  for  money  were  required  to  give  bond  to 
indemnify  the  Government  against  losses.  On  the  other  hand 
the  change  made  it  possible  for  discharged  accountable  officers 
to  receive  their  final  pay  within  a  month  after  discharge. 

On  February  24,  1919,  the  President  signed  a  bill  granting 
a  cash  bonus  of  sixty  dollars  to  every  soldier  who  had  been  in 
uniform  before  November  11,  1918.  The  payment  of  the 
bonus  to  soldiers  still  to  be  discharged  after  the  bonus  law  was 
in  effect  offered  no  difficulty  at  all,  since  the  camp  disbursing 
officers  needed  only  to  add  the  bonus  to  the  final  pay  of  each 
man  coming  up  for  discharge.  But  on  February  24  approxi- 
mately 1,600,000  troops  had  already  been  discharged.  The 
payment  of  the  bonus  to  these  men  added  measurably  to  the 
burden  of  work  upon  the  Finance  Service. 

The  Director  of  Finance  announced  that  he  would  begin 
paying  the  bonus  on  March  1.  The  Zone  Finance  Officer  at 
Washington  was  designated  as  the  official  to  pay  the  bonus  to 
officers  and  enlisted  men  who  had  already  been  discharged.  He 
hastily  organized  an  office  with  about  sixty  new  and  inexpe- 
rienced clerks.  Meanwhile  the  newspapers,  the  Red  Cross,  the 
American  Legion,  and  all  other  organizations  concerned  with 
the  welfare  of  discharged  soldiers  spread  the  tidings  of  the 
bonus  payment  and  urged  all  discharged  men  to  present  their 
claims  for  it  at  once.  It  is  doubtful  if  ever  before  a  national 
publicity  campaign  reached  its  mark  with  such  thoroughness 
in  such  a  brief  period  of  time.  Claims  for  the  bonus  snowed 
upon  Washington  at  the  rate  of  100,000  a  day,  and  within  two 
weeks  practically  all  of  the  discharged  1,600,000  had  filed 
their  claims.  The  pay  office  grew  until  it  numbered  more  than 
a  thousand  clerks.  With  this  force  it  cleaned  up  the  whole  job 
in  two  months'  time. 

Never  before  had  government  checks  been  issued  at  such  a 
rapid  rate.  It  was  necessary  to  make  use  of  the  most  modem 
labor-saving  appliances  in  accomplishing  this  record  of  pay- 
ment. The  Bureau  of  Engraving,  which  prints  the  paper  money 
for  the  Government,  engraved  a  special  check  with  the  sixty- 
dollar  amount  printed  in,  so  that  it  was  necessary  for  the 


70  DEMOBILIZATION 

clerical  force  only  to  date  the  checks,  fill  in  the  names  of 
payees,  and  then  sign  the  instruments.  The  Zone  Finance 
Officer  himself  was  the  only  person  in  his  department  author- 
ized to  sign  checks  on  the  Treasury.  However,  upon  his  request 
the  Treasury  Department  authorized  five  clerks  whom  he 
designated  to  sign  his  name  for  him.  The  Treasury  further 
authorized  the  use  of  the  pantograph  or  multiple  signing  de- 
vice, which  enabled  each  designated  clerk  to  sign  five  checks 
with  one  writing  of  the  signature.  On  the  name  line  of  each 
check  was  typed  in  the  payee's  name,  his  address,  and  his 
army  serial  number.  The  Zone  Finance  Officer  adopted  a 
window  envelope  through  which  could  be  seen  the  recipient's 
name  and  address  as  written  on  the  check  inside,  and  this  meas- 
ure saved  the  great  labor  of  addressing  the  envelopes.  All 
checks  were  typed  in  triplicate — one  original  and  two  carbon 
copies.  Both  copies  were  filed  away  to  be  the  Government's 
record  of  the  transaction.  The  cases  in  which  the  duplicates 
were  filed  filled  a  large  room. 

Soldiers  of  the  surname  of  Smith  received  15,200  of  these 
bonus  checks,  and  these  were  only  the  Smiths  among  the 
1,600,000  troops  discharged  before  March  1,  1919.  If  the  same 
percentage  carried  through  the  rest  of  the  Army,  it  is  evident 
that  there  were  enough  Smiths  in  uniform  to  make  up  an 
entire  combat  division  with  a  sufficient  residue  over  to  provide 
the  necessary  accompaniment  of  supply  troops.  If  pushed  to  it, 
the  Smith  family  could  fight  a  respectable  war  on  its  own 
account.  But  the  balance  of  power  is  maintained  by  the  Brown 
army.  The  Brown  family  collected  9,000  of  the  1,600,000 
bonus  checks  issued  from  Washington  in  the  spring  of  1919. 

Although  every  effort  was  made  to  pay  off  all  troops  in  full 
at  the  time  of  their  discharge,  there  were  many  men  who, 
through  their  own  fault  or  the  fault  of  those  in  command  of 
them,  or  else  because  of  conditions  over  which  there  was  no 
control,  failed  to  receive  all  of  the  money  rightfully  theirs 
when  they  left  the  military  service.  For  such  men  the  remedy 
was  the  claim.  A  financial  claim  against  the  Government  is 
notoriously  a  static  thing.  At  the  present  day  there  are  Civil 


PROCESS  OF  DISCHARGING  SOLDIERS        71 

War  claims  still  outstanding  and  unsettled.  The  Director  of 
Finance  determined  that  the  World  War  should  leave  behind 
it  no  great  body  of  soldier  claimants  to  haunt  Washington  and 
nurse  their  grievances  for  years  to  come.  Under  the  ordinary 
procedure  the  claims  of  soldiers  for  arrears  of  pay  had  to  go 
through  the  channels  of  both  the  War  Department  and  the 
Treasury  Department  before  final  payments  could  be  made. 
The  Director  of  Finance  sought  and,  on  January  30,  1919, 
received  a  decision  of  the  Comptroller  of  the  Treasury  which 
permitted  the  former  to  settle  back-pay  claims  without  refer- 
ence to  the  Treasury  Department  when  there  was  no  construc- 
tion of  law  involved  and  the  rights  of  the  claimants  were 
evident. 

Although  the  claimants  numbered  many  thousands,  the 
number  was  relatively  small  compared  to  the  total  number  of 
men  in  uniform.  At  the  end  of  the  calendar  year  1919,  less 
than  5  per  cent  of  the  nearly  4,000,000  men  who  were 
under  arms  on  the  first  day  of  the  armistice  had  filed  claims 
with  the  War  Department.  Three-fourths  of  the  claims  were 
for  the  refund  of  allotments  deducted  from  pay  but  for  one 
reason  or  another  never  paid  by  the  Government  to  the  allot- 
tees; so  that  only  a  little  more  than  1  per  cent  of  the  Army 
left  the  service  with  claims  resulting  from  errors  in  soldiers' 
pay  accounts.  Because  of  the  more  intricate  financial  relations 
between  officers  and  the  War  Department,  the  claims  of  offi- 
cers were  greater  in  proportion,  but  the  officers'  claims  sub- 
mitted up  to  the  end  of  the  year  1919  amounted  in  number 
to  only  10  per  cent  of  the  total  number  of  officers  commis- 
sioned. 

The  failure  of  the  Government  in  many  instances  to  pay 
over  allotments  to  soldiers'  dependents  arose  from  a  multiplic- 
ity of  causes.  In  the  first  place,  the  legal  method  of  paying 
allotments  changed  in  the  midst  of  the  active  part  of  the  war. 
The  War  Risk  Insurance  Bureau  for  many  months  paid  to 
soldiers'  dependents  the  allotments  granted  by  the  soldiers, 
plus  the  amount  which  the  Government  added  to  each  allot- 
ment. In  June,  1918,  Congress  enacted  a  law  requiring  that 


72  DEMOBILIZATION 

all  allotments  of  this  form  be  paid  directly  by  the  War  De- 
partment, leaving  the  War  Risk  Insurance  Bureau  to  pay  only 
those  allotments  which  did  not  carry  government  allowances 
with  them.  The  troops  were  at  once  apprised  of  this  change; 
but  because  of  the  failure  of  individuals  to  discontinue  their 
deductions  to  the  War  Risk  Insurance  Bureau,  or  because 
officers,  busy  with  other  things,  neglected  to  do  it  for  men 
under  their  command,  or  because  of  the  loss  of  papers  in  the 
mails,  thousands  of  pay  deductions  continued  to  go  in  to  the 
Bureau  of  War  Risk  Insurance  long  after  that  bureau  had 
discontinued  paying  the  allotments  to  dependents.  Out  of  this 
situation  arose  thousands  of  claims  from  discharged  soldiers. 

In  other  instances  allotments  were  made  to  persons  residing 
in  enemy  countries  or  in  countries  cut  off  from  mail  commu- 
nication, Russia  being  the  principal  one  of  the  latter  class. 
Failures  to  deliver  allotments  for  this  reason  resulted  in 
claims. 

As  to  soldiers'  pay,  there  were  many  reasons  why  payment 
was  not  always  accurate.  Sometimes  amounts  were  withheld 
by  the  Government  erroneously  as  court-martial  forfeitures  or 
because  of  alleged  losses  of  government  property.  Men  upon 
promotion  often  failed  to  note  on  their  pay  vouchers  that  they 
were  entitled  to  the  advanced  pay,  and  so  failed  for  a  time  to 
receive  their  increases.  Some  failed  to  receive  the  increase  in 
pay  due  for  foreign  service,  and  some  did  not  get  their  cash 
commutations  of  rations  and  quarters  while  on  leave  at  the 
recreational  areas  in  France.  In  all  there  were  fourteen  major 
classes  of  claims  for  back  pay. 

There  were  claims  of  still  another  class — claims  for  personal 
baggage  lost  by  the  Government  in  transporting  the  Army. 

Although  the  individual  soldier's  affidavit  was  largely  used 
in  the  settlement  of  claims,  still  such  a  short-cut  method  of 
arriving  at  a  judgment  was  permissible  only  when  the  official 
records  were  missing.  The  gradual  concentration  of  records 
after  the  armistice,  and  sometimes  the  discovery  of  lost  records 
as  the  disbanding  Army  cleared  up  its  quarters,  often  brought 
to  light  papers  that  had  been  missing  when  the  troops  were 


PROCESS  OF  DISCHARGING  SOLDIERS       73 

discharged.  Every  claim  submitted  involved  on  the  part  of 
the  Finance  Service  a  search  of  the  records.  Since  many  of  the 
records  on  which  the  claim  depended  were  in  the  possession  of 
the  A.  E.  F.  in  France,  it  was  impossible  for  a  long  time  to 
do  much  in  Washington  with  such  claims.  The  A.  E.  F.  rec- 
ords returned  to  the  United  States  in  the  early  autumn  of 
1919,  but  it  was  several  months  thereafter  before  they  were 
properly  sorted,  filed,  and  made  available  for  research. 

During  the  first  fifteen  months  after  the  armistice,  the 
claims  submitted  to  the  War  Department  by  former  enlisted 
men  totaled  184,256.  Of  these,  about  64,000  were  paid  in  that 
period,  33,000  declined,  and  6,400  transferred  to  some  other 
branch  of  the  Government  for  settlement — 103,000  claims 
disposed  of  and  81,000  still  in  process  of  adjudication  and 
settlement. 


CHAPTER  VI 
PICKING  UP  AFTER  THE  ARMY 

EVEN  in  the  United  States,  with  its  well-developed 
trunk-checking  and  baggage-transfer  systems,  the  man- 
agement of  any  considerable  amount  of  personal  lug- 
gage gives  concern  to  the  traveler.  In  a  foreign  land,  travel 
with  baggage  is  nothing  less  than  an  ordeal ;  and  the  man  who 
can  convoy  a  fleet  of  trunks  over  a  foreign  tour  and  bring  them 
all  back  without  loss  to  the  home  port,  may  safely  regard  him- 
self as  an  expert  globe-trotter.  What,  then,  of  the  A.  E.  F.? 
It  was  on  foreign  soil,  in  a  land  where  military  traffic  had 
almost  altogether  superseded  civilian,  and  the  troops  had  little 
benefit  of  the  services  which  ordinarily  look  out  for  civilians. 
The  soldiers,  by  the  nature  of  things,  could  not  give  personal 
attention  to  their  baggage.  You  might  multiply  the  troubles 
of  the  individual  traveler  by  the  two  million  men  of  the 
A.  E.  F.,  and  still  fall  short  of  even  half  of  the  baggage 
problem  of  that  organization. 

The  baggage  problem  was  one  of  those  unforeseen  compli- 
cations which  arose  to  make  the  task  of  maintaining  the  expe- 
dition harder  than  it  had  at  first  seemed  to  be.  It  was  by  no 
means  entirely  a  transportation  problem,  although  whole 
organizations,  when  advancing  toward  France,  often  had  to 
leave  their  baggage  behind  them  to  follow  by  train  or  ship, 
and  this  baggage,  entrusted  to  unfamiliar  hands,  sometimes 
went  astray.  But  the  greatest  losses  occurred  in  France  itself, 
where  the  troops  were  quartered.  Units  were  often  moved  on 
short  notice.  Expecting  eventually  to  return  to  the  same  billets, 
the  soldiers  left  their  effects  where  they  were  and  traveled 
light ;  but  seldom  did  it  happen  that  they  returned  to  that  area 
again.  Other  organizations  moved  into  the  places  thus  vacated, 


PICKING  UP  AFTER  THE  ARMY  75 

themselves  later  on  to  move  forward  and  leave  baggage  behind. 
In  the  course  of  time,  literally  millions  of  pieces  of  American 
military  baggage  in  France  became  beautifully  and  thoroughly 
lost. 

This  state  of  affairs  called  into  being  a  military  unit  strange 
to  our  army  structure — the  Lost  Baggage  Bureau  of  the 
A.  E.  F.,  established  as  a  branch  of  the  Quartermaster  De- 
partment. Before  the  armistice  the  Lost  Baggage  Bureau  had 
attempted  to  do  little  more  than  set  up  certain  facilities, 
notably  a  central  baggage  depot  at  Gievres,  the  Q.  M.  head- 
quarters of  the  A.  E.  F.,  in  which  divisions  ordered  up  to  the 
trenches  could  store  their  excess  baggage.  This  arrangement 
did  well  enough  until  the  fighting  ended,  and  then  for  the 
first  time  the  lost-baggage  problem  began  to  make  its  magni- 
tude manifest.  After  the  armistice  tens  of  thousands  of 
enquiries  about  lost  baggage  began  to  shower  down  upon  the 
Services  of  Supply,  making  it  evident  that  great  quantities  of 
American  property  must  be  scattered  throughout  the  area  occu- 
pied by  the  Yankee  troops  in  France.  The  little  one-horse  Lost 
Baggage  Bureau  gave  way  to  an  extensive  organization, 
known  as  the  Baggage  Service  of  the  A.  E.  F.  The  function  of 
the  new  Service  thereafter  was  to  manage  the  transportation 
of  all  troop  baggage  during  the  exodus  from  France  and  to 
locate,  collect,  and  if  possible  restore  to  its  ownership,  all  bag- 
gage lost  by  the  soldiers  of  the  expedition. 

The  Baggage  Service  went  at  the  problem  with  a  plan  drawn 
true  to  scale.  American  troops  had  been  quartered  at  one  time 
or  another  in  fifty-nine  departments  of  the  Republic  of  France. 
This  great  territory  the  Baggage  Service  divided  for  its  pur- 
poses into  twenty-one  zones.  In  each  zone  it  placed  a  local 
organization  in  charge  of  an  officer  whose  instructions  were 
to  go  over  his  district  with  a  fine-tooth  comb  and  collect  and 
forward  to  the  central  office  at  Gievres  all  lost  articles  belong- 
ing to  individual  American  soldiers  or  to  the  Army  as  a  whole. 
The  search  which  then  ensued  not  only  took  in  hotels,  rail- 
road stations,  police  headquarters,  and  other  obvious  places 
in  which  lost  property  might  be  expected  to  collect,  but  it 


76  DEMOBILIZATION 

involved  also  a  house-to-house  search  of  all  areas  in  which 
American  troops  had  been  billeted  upon  the  French  popula- 
tion. Each  day  the  zone  officers  sent  to  headquarters  reports 
which  contained  the  descriptions  of  the  articles  found.  The 
central  baggage  office  took  this  information  and  indexed  it, 
together  with  the  descriptions  of  the  90,000  pieces  of  baggage 
which  had  accumulated  in  the  Gievres  warehouse  up  to  the 
time  the  armistice  began.  By  May  1,  1919,  all  of  the  territory 
occupied  by  the  Americans  had  been  thoroughly  searched  over 
and  cleaned  up,  and  hundreds  of  thousands  of  pieces  of  bag- 
gage, once  lost,  had  been  catalogued  and  stored  at  the  head- 
quarters of  the  various  base  sections  or  in  the  central  ware- 
house at  Gievres. 

Although  most  of  this  baggage  was  obviously  the  property 
of  individual  soldiers,  the  search  also  turned  up  a  great  deal 
of  government  property.  This  included  some  twenty  rolling 
kitchens  in  good  condition,  abandoned  for  one  reason  or  an- 
other, hundreds  of  rifles  and  pistols,  numerous  helmets,  many 
uniforms  still  wearable,  and  even  bags  of  mail  which  had  never 
reached  destination.  The  searching  parties  came  upon  a  lone 
army  mule  resigned  to  its  apparent  fate  of  ending  its  days 
as  an  adjunct  to  an  impressive  manure  pile  in  a  French 
peasant's  dooryard. 

By  the  time  the  search  was  complete  and  the  baggage  had 
been  collected,  the  troops  were  then  moving  in  such  numbers 
up  to  the  French  ports  of  embarkation  for  their  passage  home 
to  the  United  States  that  it  was  found  to  be  impossible  to 
restore  their  lost  property  to  them  en  route.  The  Baggage  Serv- 
ice in  France  was  able  to  hand  over  to  their  owners  only  about 
50,000  pieces  of  baggage.  In  early  June,  1919,  it  was  decided 
to  ship  all  the  remaining  unclaimed  baggage  to  Hoboken, 
where  the  owners  could  obtain  it  after  their  return  to  the 
United  States.  The  baggage  thus  shipped  filled  sixty-three 
baggage  cars  and  provided  a  large  part  of  the  lading  of  an 
entire  cargo  transport.  With  the  baggage  to  Hoboken  went 
the  records  from  Gievres,  to  be  used  by  the  Lost  Baggage 


PICKING  UP  AFTER  THE  ARMY  77 

Service  at  Hoboken  in  restoring  property  to  overseas  soldiers 
returned  to  the  United  States. 

The  A.  E.  F.'s  Baggage  Service,  besides  finding  and  caring 
for  lost  baggage,  was  charged  with  the  important  duty  of 
acting  as  the  baggage  agent  for  the  returning  expedition. 
There  was  no  counterpart  to  such  an  organization  before  the 
armistice.  Had  there  been,  the  Expeditionary  Forces  would 
have  had  practically  no  baggage  problem  at  all,  so  far  as  the 
loss  of  baggage  en  route  was  concerned ;  for,  on  the  way  home, 
thanks  to  the  new  Service,  the  troops  lost  scarcely  any  baggage. 
Here,  then,  was  another  new  military  organization  called  into 
existence  by  our  experience  in  the  World  War;  one  which 
proved  its  usefulness  and  thereby  won  a  place  for  itself  in  any 
plans  for  large  military  operations  in  the  future.  The  Baggage 
Service  saved  its  own  cost  over  and  over  again,  for  the  Gov- 
ernment itself  is  often  responsible  for  the  loss  of  the  personal 
baggage  of  soldiers  and  expects  to  pay  in  cash  the  claims  pre- 
sented. Indeed,  many  claims  for  lost  baggage  which  had 
accrued  at  A.  E.  F.  headquarters  were  settled  by  the  restora- 
tion of  the  baggage  itself  to  its  owners. 

In  handling  baggage  for  the  traveling  expedition,  the  Bag- 
gage Service  set  up  branches  at  all  the  important  A.  E.  F. 
troop  centers  and  at  all  the  American  embarkation  ports  in 
France.  The  function  of  the  baggage  men  at  the  troop  centers 
was  to  see  to  it  that  when  units  departed  their  baggage  went 
forward  with  them,  properly  marked  and  routed.  The  Service 
took  charge,  not  only  of  organization  baggage,  but  of  the 
baggage  of  individual  soldiers  as  well.  At  the  ports  its  branches 
acted  as  checking,  storing,  and  forwarding  agents.  Brest  was 
the  largest  of  our  embarkation  ports  in  France,  and  at  Brest 
the  official  baggage  office  was  operated  by  five  officers  and  one 
hundred  enlisted  men.  The  official  "baggage  room"  at  Brest 
was  a  whole  huge  warehouse  located  on  one  of  the  jetties.  The 
military  passengers  awaiting  embarkation  at  Brest  usually 
numbered  well  over  100,000,  and  it  took  an  immense  storage 
space  to  contain  all  their  baggage. 

Officers  of  the  baggage  organization  met  all  troop  trains 


78  DEMOBILIZATION 

arriving  in  the  Brest  area.  On  these  trains  were  thousands  of 
officers  and  enlisted  men  traveling  alone  or  in  small  groups  as 
casuals.  From  these  the  military  baggage  agents  secured  their 
railroad  baggage  checks,  together  with  cards  on  which  the 
travelers  wrote  identifying  descriptions  of  their  baggage. 
Thereafter  the  individual  traveler  had  no  further  baggage 
worries.  The  Baggage  Service  secured  the  pieces  from  the  rail- 
road stations,  loaded  them  on  trucks  and  took  them  to  the 
central  warehouse,  and  then  made  out  index  cards  identifying 
them  and  showing  their  location  in  storage.  These  cards  were 
made  out  in  the  owners'  names  and  filed  alphabetically.  When- 
ever a  transport  was  preparing  to  sail,  the  embarkation  authori- 
ties sent  to  the  Baggage  Service  a  copy  of  the  passenger  list. 
The  baggage  people  checked  over  this  list  against  the  record 
cards,  and  were  thus  able  easily  to  assemble  the  baggage  be- 
longing to  the  passengers  to  sail  on  that  ship.  The  baggage  was 
taken  out  to  the  transport  on  lighters,  and  the  canceled  iden- 
tification cards  were  thereupon  stamped  with  the  name  of  the 
transport  and  the  date  of  sailing  and  then  filed  away  in  the 
dead  file.  The  baggage  of  organizations  was  handled  in  the 
same  way,  except  that  the  troop  units  did  not  abandon  the 
practice  of  sending  their  own  baggage  details  along  with  their 
baggage  to  watch  it.  These  detachments  of  soldiers  remained 
with  the  baggage  at  all  times,  even  when  it  was  stored  in  the 
warehouse. 

The  military  organization  in  the  United  States  had  nothing 
comparable  to  the  A.  E.  F.'s  Baggage  Service  to  take  charge 
of  the  baggage  of  traveling  troops,  but  it  did  have  an  organi- 
zation to  handle  lost  baggage.  This  was  not  a  branch  of  the 
Quartermaster  Department,  as  it  was  in  France,  but  an  agency 
set  up  by  the  Transportation  Service,  an  independent  bureau 
of  the  General  Staff's  Division  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and 
Traffic.  It  was  called  the  Lost  Baggage  Section,  and  it  oper- 
ated exclusively  at  Hoboken.  Although  we  had  several  other 
ports  of  debarkation  for  the  returning  expedition,  Hoboken 
was  designated  to  receive  all  the  lost  baggage  from  France. 
When,  in  late  June,  Hoboken  received  the  vast  accumulation 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 


COMMON  GRAVE  NEAR  CIREY 

(See  page  89.) 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

LOST  xMILITARY  BAGGAGE  AT  HOBOKEN 


mis^msk.Mmi2sm^c^.7^. 


tJ^-^    L^.^-^'itf^'S 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

PREPARING  CEMETERY  AT  BEAUMONT 


"•^mma^ 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

LOADING  COFFINS  ON  COLLECTION  TRUCKS 


PICKING  UP  AFTER  THE  ARMY  79 

of  lost  baggage  which  had  been  stored  at  Gievres  and  at  the 
base  headquarters  of  the  A.  E.  F.,  the  work  of  the  Lost  Bag- 
gage Section  began  in  earnest.  One  of  the  great  Hoboken  pier- 
heads, with  its  echoing,  bamlike  storage  room  and  adjoining 
offices,  was  given  over  exclusively  to  the  Lost  Baggage  Sec- 
tion, which  put  to  work  more  than  two  hundred  clerks  to 
handle  the  voluminous  correspondence  which  sprang  up  imme- 
diately. Individual  owners,  their  relatives,  various  soldier- 
relief  organizations,  and  even  members  of  Congress  who  had 
interested  themselves  in  soldiers,  deluged  the  Lost  Baggage 
Section  with  enquiries.  When  the  armistice  was  a  year  old  the 
Section  had  handled  2,000,000  pieces  of  miscellaneous  bag- 
gage, and  had  succeeded  in  delivering  eleven  pieces  of  every 
dozen  received  from  France. 

In  the  United  States,  among  the  troops  quartered  at  the 
cantonments,  camps,  posts,  and  stations  of  the  war-time  estab- 
lishment and  traveling  over  the  American  railroads,  there  was 
no  such  baggage  problem  as  had  fretted  the  A.  E.  F.,  but  never- 
theless there  was  one  of  considerable  size.  Shortly  after  the 
armistice  the  Transportation  Service  took  cognizance  of  an 
accumulation  of  reports  which  it  had  received  telling  of  bag- 
gage, ostensibly  the  property  of  soldiers,  which  was  remaining 
unclaimed  at  railroad  stations  and  at  posts  formerly  occupied 
by  troops.  It  happened  that  about  that  time  the  general  bag- 
gage agents  of  the  principal  American  trunk  lines  held  a  con- 
vention in  Washington.  The  Transportation  Service  seized 
the  opportunity  of  this  meeting  to  request  the  cooperation  of 
the  railroads  in  returning  lost  baggage  to  soldiers.  The  baggage 
agents  agreed  to  secure  a  complete  report  from  the  whole 
United  States  of  all  military  baggage  on  hand  at  parcel  rooms, 
express  rooms,  and  baggage  rooms.  At  the  same  time  the 
Transportation  Service  ordered  the  commanders  of  all  the  mili- 
tary camps  in  the  United  States  to  send  to  Washington  inven- 
tories of  unclaimed  baggage  at  the  camps.  The  next  step  was 
to  find  out  what  soldiers  had  lost  any  baggage.  Newspapers 
and  service  journals  gave  publicity  to  the  project  of  the  Trans- 
portation Service,  and  the  various  welfare  societies  added  their 


8o  DEMOBILIZATION 

assistance,  with  the  result  that  the  Service  was  able  to  restore 
hundreds  of  pieces  of  lost  baggage  to  their  rightful  owners. 
Again  the  United  States  was  saved  a  considerable  sum  of 
money  which  otherwise  it  would  have  had  to  pay  out  in  settle- 
ment of  claims. 

One  task  of  the  military  authorities,  similar  to  the  restora- 
tion of  lost  baggage,  but  much  more  delicate  and  requiring  a 
high  degree  of  tact  and  sympathy  in  its  administration,  was 
that  of  returning  to  bereaved  relatives  the  baggage  of  soldiers 
who  had  been  killed  in  battle  or  who  had  died  on  foreign  soil. 
This  was  so  obviously  a  work  of  its  own  kind,  requiring  men 
peculiarly  adapted  to  the  handling  of  it,  that  it  was  placed  in 
charge  of  a  special  service,  both  in  France  and  in  the  United 
States.  In  France  the  Effects  Bureau,  as  the  organization  was 
called,  was  part  of  the  Quartermaster  Department;  in  the 
United  States  a  bureau  of  the  same  name,  and  virtually  the 
successor  of  the  overseas  organization,  was  attached  to  the 
Transportation  Service,  and,  like  the  Lost  Baggage  Section, 
operated  exclusively  at  Hoboken. 

As  long  as  the  A.  E.  F.  was  in  France  in  force  the  overseas 
Effects  Bureau  handled  most  of  this  work.  It  set  up  headquar- 
ters at  the  embarkation  port  at  St.  Nazaire,  and  there  it 
checked  up  all  the  baggage  it  could  find  which  was  the  prop- 
erty of  deceased  soldiers  and  forwarded  it  to  the  United  States. 
Many  of  these  effects  were  found  in  the  general  search  of 
France  for  lost  baggage,  but  thousands  of  pieces  were  stored 
at  military  hospitals  and  with  troop  organizations. 

The  work  of  restoring  the  effects  to  heirs  in  the  United 
States  and  elsewhere  did  not  attain  any  great  size  until  after 
the  armistice,  and  then  it  was  handled  almost  entirely  by  the 
Effects  Bureau  at  Hoboken.  In  July  and  August,  1918,  for 
instance,  the  shipments  of  deceased  soldiers'  effects  received  in 
the  United  States  were  fewer  than  one  hundred  in  number: 
in  the  month  of  May,  1919,  alone,  Hoboken  received  more 
than  15,000  packages  of  such  effects.  By  that  date  the  work  of 
disposing  of  this  property  was  engaging  the  attention  of  one  of 
the  largest  individual  offices  connected  with  the  Fort  of  Em- 


PICKING  UP  AFTER  THE  ARMY  81 

barkation  of  New  York.  All  through  the  summer  of  1919  the 
Effects  Bureau  handled  a  correspondence  that  averaged  1,000 
letters  a  day. 

It  was  not  enough  for  an  officer  in  the  Effects  Bureau  to  be 
well  meaning  and  kindly  intentioned — to  fit  his  place,  he  had 
to  possess  a  rare  tact,  an  instinctive  knowledge  of  what  to  do 
in  circumstances  that  constantly  varied.  Early  in  the  episode 
the  Bureau  witnessed  a  striking  example  of  how  not  to  deal 
with  a  bereaved  family.  One  of  our  aviators  had  been  killed  in 
France  when  his  plane  crashed  to  the  ground.  At  the  time  he 
had  in  his  pocket  six  100-franc  notes.  These  were  badly 
charred  in  the  flames  that  had  nearly  incinerated  the  airman. 
The  misguided  effects  officer  who  took  charge  of  the  dead 
aviator's  baggage,  thinking  he  was  doing  a  kindness,  replaced 
the  mutilated  notes  with  six  new  ones  and  forwarded  these 
to  the  aviator's  family,  telling  in  a  letter  what  he  had  done. 
The  family  promptly  returned  the  new  notes  with  the  request 
that  the  charred  currency  be  sent  instead,  because  they  would 
prize  the  burned  money  as  a  keepsake  more  highly  than  they 
would  any  amount  of  new  money. 

This  incident  apprised  the  Effects  Bureau,  at  the  outset,  of 
the  extraordinary  value  which  the  relatives  of  deceased  sol- 
diers were  likely  to  attach  to  the  most  apparently  trifling  pos- 
sessions. The  men  of  the  Bureau  had  to  understand  this  fact. 
Moreover,  they  had  to  be  men  of  scrupulous  honesty.  In  the 
effects  of  men  who  had  died  abroad  was  a  great  deal  of  money 
in  cash,  and  under  the  circumstances  there  could  be  no  check 
upon  the  people  handling  this  cash.  The  opportunities  of  pil- 
fering from  the  dead  were  wide  open.  Consequently  the  Army 
picked  only  men  of  the  highest  quality  to  serve  in  the  Effects 
Bureau. 

The  Bureau  at  Hoboken  was  compelled  to  accept  responsi- 
bility for  many  unfortunate  occurrences  in  which  it  was  not 
at  fault.  The  procedure  behind  a  letter  telling  relatives  in  this 
country  of  the  existence  of  property  which  they  had  inherited 
upon  the  death  of  a  soldier  was  approximately  as  follows: 
after  the  man  died  the  officers  of  his  immediate  organization 


82  DEMOBILIZATION 

made  up  an  inventory  of  his  property;  and  this  inventory, 
together  with  the  baggage  itself,  eventually  reached  the  Effects 
Bureau.  It  was  usually  this  original  inventory  which  went  to 
the  relatives.  Often  enough,  however,  the  dead  man's  property 
was  not  all  in  his  possession  when  he  died.  Perhaps  he  had  been 
billeted  in  villages  where  he  had  left  souvenirs  and  other 
cherished  but  not  easily  portable  trinkets,  intending  to  go  back 
some  time  and  secure  his  property  before  he  started  back  for 
the  United  States.  He  was  unlikely  to  have  left  among  his 
effects  any  record  of  these  articles;  and  yet  his  relatives  were 
quite  likely  to  know  of  the  existence  of  the  property  from  the 
soldier's  letters  home.  The  baggage  search  in  France  raked 
together  a  considerable  quantity  of  this  property,  the  owner- 
ship of  much  of  which  could  not  be  determined  by  any  iden- 
tifying marks.  Consequently,  when  relatives  wrote  to  the 
Effects  Bureau  to  reproach  that  service  with  not  having  re- 
turned all  of  the  deceased  soldier's  property  the  Bureau  was 
often  able  to  find  the  articles  among  the  lost  baggage  at 
Hoboken.  Frequently,  however,  the  Bureau  had  to  confess 
itself  unable  to  locate  the  lost  articles  and  to  bear  the  brunt  of 
any  displeasure  that  followed  such  an  admission. 

After  the  Tuscania  disaster  the  British  authorities  shipped 
to  Hoboken  a  miscellaneous  collection  of  unidentified  articles 
of  value,  such  as  watches  and  finger  rings  taken  from  the  bodies 
of  drowned  American  soldiers.  It  seemed  to  be  an  impossible 
task  to  restore  these  trinkets  to  the  relatives  of  the  rightful 
owners,  but  the  Effects  Bureau  nevertheless  made  the  attempt 
to  do  it.  The  Bureau  wrote  letters  to  all  the  next  of  kin  to  the 
soldiers  who  went  down  with  the  Tuscania^  asking  them  to 
send  in  descriptions  of  any  articles  known  to  have  been  in  the 
possession  of  the  soldiers  when  they  boarded  the  ship.  The 
replies  brought  back  duplicate  prints  of  photographs  carried 
in  watch  cases,  dimensions  of  finger  rings,  descriptions,  and 
other  identifications,  which  enabled  the  Bureau  to  restore 
many  of  the  articles  to  the  proper  heirs  in  this  country. 

After  an  arrival  of  identified  effects  in  Hoboken,  the  Effects 
Bureau  wrote  letters  to  the  immediate  relatives  or  other  heirs 


PICKING  UP  AFTER  THE  ARMY  83 

of  the  deceased  soldiers  describing  the  property  on  hand.  With 
each  letter  went  a  legal  form,  to  be  filled  out  and  executed 
before  a  notary  public,  establishing  the  right  of  the  proper 
heirs  to  receive  the  effects.  Upon  the  receipt  of  executed  forms, 
the  Bureau  sent  forward  the  effects  at  the  expense  of  the 
Government. 

The  effects  piled  up  in  the  Hoboken  pier  contained  many  a 
pathetic  reminder  of  the  invincible  curiosity  and  enterprise  of 
the  American  boys  in  France  and  of  their  passion  for  souve- 
nirs of  the  war.  The  dead  men  had  collected  from  almost  every 
part  of  Europe  thousands  of  keepsakes  of  every  description. 
In  the  baggage  of  one  deceased  soldier  was  found  a  German 
machine  gun  which  he  had  acquired  in  some  manner  and  had 
succeeded  in  identifying  as  his  personal  property.  Occasion- 
ally those  going  over  the  effects  found  the  contraband  loaded 
shell  and  grenades.  These  were  confiscated  and  destroyed,  be- 
cause of  their  dangerousness,  but  all  other  property  was  rever- 
ently handled  and  protected.  Because  of  the  complete  lack  of 
identification  for  some  thousands  of  parcels,  it  was  impossible 
to  make  complete  restoration  of  the  effects  to  the  heirs  of  the 
American  dead.  Nevertheless,  by  the  end  of  1919  the  Effects 
Bureau  had  delivered  more  than  35,000  sets  of  personal 
effects  of  deceased  soldiers  to  their  families. 

In  winding  up  the  affairs  of  the  American  Expeditionary 
Forces  in  France,  there  was  a  final,  mournful  task  for  the 
Quartermaster  Service;  one  of  large  proportions  and  unusual 
difficulty — that  of  disposing  of  the  soldier  dead.  During  the 
fighting  it  had  been  taken  for  granted  by  many  that  the  Ameri- 
cans who  fell  would  be  interred  in  great  American  cemeteries 
in  France,  to  be  maintained  and  kept  beautiful  forever  by  the 
American  Government;  but  after  the  armistice  there  devel- 
oped in  this  country,  among  those  bereft  of  their  sons  and 
brothers,  a  powerful  feeling  that  the  bodies  of  these  boys 
should  be  returned  to  final  resting  places  within  the  United 
States.  The  country,  or  that  part  of  it  immediately  interested 
in  the  question,  divided  into  two  opposite  camps  and  attempted 


84  DEMOBILIZATION 

to  force  the  War  Department  into  a  definite  policy  one  way 
or  the  other. 

When  the  aviator  Quentin  Roosevelt  was  killed,  his  father, 
the  late  Theodore  Roosevelt,  quoted  the  words  of  the  rugged 
Old  Testament  Preacher:  "In  the  place  where  the  tree  falleth, 
there  it  shall  be."  This  was  perhaps  the  strong  attitude,  and 
a  considerable  number  of  bereaved  relatives  of  soldiers  felt  as 
did  Roosevelt;  but  they  were,  after  all,  the  minority.  Thou- 
sands of  mothers,  sisters,  and  sweethearts  on  the  farms  and 
in  the  hamlets,  towns,  and  cities  of  the  United  States  held 
rather  with  the  poet,  Theodore  O'Hara: 

"Your  own  proud  land's  heroic  soil 
Shall  be  your  fitter  grave." 

In  this  contention  the  War  Department  took  no  sides.  It  did 
not  adopt  the  wishes  of  the  majority  as  a  government  policy, 
nor  yet  those  of  the  minority;  but  it  allowed  each  bereaved 
family  to  have  its  own  way.  If  the  family  asked  for  the  return 
of  the  body,  that  the  War  Department  agreed  to.  If  the  family 
were  willing  to  have  the  body  remain  buried  in  France,  the 
War  Department  guaranteed  that  the  grave  should  always  be 
a  hallowed  and  beautiful  spot. 

As  soon  as  the  A.  E.  F.  began  reaching  France  in  force  and 
its  command  realized  that  American  troops  were  to  bear  their 
full  share  of  the  future  fighting,  the  importance  of  identify- 
ing the  slain  and  their  graves  asserted  itself  as  a  major  prob- 
lem. The  experiences  of  the  other  armies  had  not  been  pleasant 
in  this  respect,  and  the  command  of  the  expedition  did  not 
underestimate  the  difficulties.  The  British  Army,  for  .instance, 
had  lost  the  identification  of  fully  40  per  cent  of  its  dead. 
This  was  not  due  to  the  lack  of  identification  of  the  dead  at  the 
time  of  burial  so  much  as  it  was  to  the  obliteration  of  ceme- 
teries by  shell  fire  as  the  battle  front  surged  back  and  forth 
over  many  kilometers  of  ground.  After  the  American  Army 
reached  the  front  in  force  in  the  summer  of  1918,  it  never 
knew  a  major  retreating  action;  its  movement  was  always  for- 
ward, and  its  cemeteries,  always  in  the  rear,  were  never  de- 


PICKING  UP  AFTER  THE  ARMY  85 

stroyed.  The  result  was  that  the  A.  E.  F.  maintained  an 
extraordinarily  high  percentage  of  identification.  Less  than 
2  per  cent  of  its  graves,  after  all  the  evidence  was  in,  housed 
unknown  dead. 

The  first  step  taken  by  the  A.  E.  F.  to  accomplish  this  result 
was  to  establish,  in  the  summer  of  1917,  a  Graves  Registration 
Service  in  the  Quartermaster  Department.  The  original  plan 
was  for  this  Service  to  send  out  field  units  to  take  complete 
charge  of  the  disposition  of  remains — burying  the  dead  on 
the  battle  fields  and  elsewhere,  acquiring  land  for  cemeteries, 
keeping  the  records  of  burials,  and  maintaining  the  cemeteries 
in  the  future.  Sentiment  among  the  troops  themselves  brought 
about  a  change  in  this  arrangement.  As  soon  as  the  divisions 
suffered  their  first  casualties,  the  comrades  of  the  dead  men 
could  not  bear  to  have  their  friends  buried  by  strangers,  even 
though  the  strangers  were  Americans  in  the  American  uniform. 
Consequently  G.  H.  O.  modified  the  original  order,  saying  that 
"the  dead  must  necessarily  be  buried  by  the  units  themselves. 
These  units  perform  this  duty  as  tribute  to  their  dead." 
Thereafter  the  Graves  Registration  Service  merely  recorded 
all  burials  and  grave  locations  and  looked  after  the  graves. 

Such  a  system  was  maintained  until  the  early  autumn  of 
1918.  Then  the  fighting  reached  its  most  intense  stage,  and 
our  advancing  forces  could  spare  neither  time  nor  energy  for 
the  proper  burial  of  the  slain.  At  this  juncture  the  field  units 
of  the  Graves  Registration  Service  stepped  in  voluntarily, 
without  waiting  for  special  orders,  and  assisted  in  searching 
the  ground  for  dead  men  and  in  burying  them,  enlisting  such 
aid  in  the  work  as  they  could  find  on  the  spot.  This  was  the 
time  of  the  heaviest  American  casualties,  and  the  units  of  the 
Graves  Registration  Service  buried  in  all  some  10,000  dead 
American  soldiers. 

The  work  of  the  Graves  Registration  Service  was  rendered 
particularly  difBcult  by  the  width  and  the  separation  of  the 
areas  over  which  the  American  troops  fought.  It  was  not  as  if 
the  front  had  been  a  continuous  line.  Some  Americans  had 
fallen  in  Belgium,   others  with  the  British  at  the  Franco- 


86  DEMOBILIZATION 

Belgium  border,  and  still  others  at  the  southern  extremity  of 
the  line,  where  it  entered  Alsace-Lorraine;  but  most  of  the 
American  casualties  had  occurred  in  the  Argonne  when,  during 
the  final  weeks  of  the  war,  the  A.  E.  F.  had  forced  a  passage 
of  that  rough,  forested,  and  traditionally  impenetrable  terrain. 

In  those  last  weeks  in  the  Argonne  the  advancing  troops  had 
been  too  exhausted  to  make  any  thorough  search  of  the  battle 
areas  for  the  bodies  of  their  slain  comrades.  Consequently  one 
of  the  first  acts  of  the  command  of  the  A,  E.  F.  after  the  armi- 
stice was  to  order  an  immediate,  thorough  search  of  all  ground 
where  our  troops  had  been  in  action.  Large  numbers  of  divi- 
sional soldiers  were  assigned  to  help  the  Graves  Registration 
Service  in  this  work.  Through  the  wreckage  and  debris  of 
the  Argonne  went  the  search  parties,  sometimes  finding  un- 
buried  bodies  and  frequently  bodies  poorly  and  even  only  par- 
tially buried.  To  these  the  Graves  Registration  Service  gave 
proper  interment,  marking  all  these  temporary  graves  so  that 
the  identity  of  their  occupants  would  not  be  lost.  While  this 
was  going  on,  similar  searching  parties  were  at  work  in  all 
the  other  battle  areas  in  which  American  troops  had  been  in 
action,  and  still  other  units  of  the  Service  followed  up  behind 
the  Army  of  Occupation  which  was  advancing  through  Luxem- 
bourg to  the  Rhine,  in  order  to  discover  and  identify  the  graves 
of  any  Americans  who  might  have  died,  as  prisoners  or  other- 
wise, behind  the  former  German  front.  And  the  searchers  were 
not  content  with  a  single  examination  of  the  ground:  they 
went  over  every  square  yard  of  it  three  times,  the  final  search 
being  a  check  of  the  accuracy  of  the  preceding  two.  Largely  to 
the  thoroughness  of  this  work  was  due  the  completeness  of  the 
identification  of  the  A.  E.  F.  dead. 

After  the  widely  scattered  graves  were  located,  it  was  next 
the  task  of  the  Graves  Registration  Service  to  concentrate  the 
bodies  of  the  slain  into  as  few  cemeteries  as  possible.  The 
American  dead  had  been  buried  in  approximately  two  thou- 
sand principal  places.  The  concentration  of  the  bodies  was 
able  to  reduce  the  number  of  American  cemeteries  to  about 
seven  hundred.  Not  only  were  the  bodies  in  isolated  graves 


■+ 


'-f^^^iri-\t^J^-jXit** 


^         >■ 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

1.  OVERFLOWED  AMERICAN  CEMETERY  AT  FLEVILLE 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

2.  TWO  MONTHS  LATER— BODIES  ALL  REMOVED 


Photo  by  Sicrnal  Corps 

1.  ROMAGNE  CEMETERY,  APRIL  lo,  1919 


Photo  by  Siytiiil  Cor/'s 

2.  ROMAGNE  CEMETERY,  MAY  30,  1919 


PICKING  UP  AFTER  THE  ARMY  87 

brought  in  to  the  concentration  cemeteries,  but  sometimes 
entire  cemeteries  were  abandoned  and  all  the  bodies  in  them 
removed.  This  was  particularly  true  when  the  emergency 
cemeteries  had  been  poorly  located.  The  Graves  Registration 
Service  would  not  allow  even  the  elements  to  be  unkind  to 
the  bodies  of  our  fallen  soldiers.  At  Fleville  the  divisional 
troops  had  buried  a  number  of  their  comrades  in  an  emergency 
cemetery  located  between  a  small  stream  and  an  embanked 
road.  During  the  first  winter  of  the  armistice  the  stream  over- 
flowed its  banks  and  flooded  the  little  cemetery,  leaving  only 
a  few  crosses  sticking  up  out  of  the  water.  The  Graves  Regis- 
tration Service  sent  a  force  of  two  hundred  men  to  the  place. 
In  three  weeks  they  had  built  a  dam  around  the  entire  cemetery 
and  had  pumped  out  the  water,  after  which  the  bodies  of 
eighty-seven  Americans  were  disinterred  and  removed  to  a 
better  burial  ground. 

The  sites  of  the  American  concentration  cemeteries  were 
carefully  selected  by  the  French  Government  itself,  which  set 
up  special  commissions  for  that  work.  Each  commission  in- 
cluded within  its  membership  various  engineers  and  sanitary 
experts,  as  well  as  officers  of  the  American  Graves  Registration 
Service.  The  first  of  the  American  concentration  cemeteries 
was  established  soon  after  the  action  at  Chateau-Thierry. 
Most  of  them,  however,  were  created  after  the  armistice.  As 
soon  as  the  site  for  a  permanent  cemetery  had  been  secured  by 
the  A.  E.  F.  and  a  few  of  its  sections  plotted  and  marked  off, 
the  Graves  Registration  Service  set  labor  troops  to  work  dig- 
ging rows  of  graves,  each  five  feet  deep,  and  at  the  same  time 
started  out  collection  parties  to  bring  in  bodies.  The  concen- 
tration cemeteries  gathered  bodies  in  from  distances  as  great 
as  fifty  miles.  While  the  bodies  were  being  brought  in  and 
reburied,  engineers  were  at  work  laying  out  roads  in  the  ceme- 
tery, grading,  and  perfecting  the  drainage,  surveyors  marked 
off  new  sections,  and  landscape  gardeners  planted  shrubbery 
and  prepared  lawns. 

The  work  of  gathering  the  bodies  fell  into  a  dreary  routine. 
Each  collection  party  consisted  of  an  officer  and  eight  or  nine 


88  DEMOBILIZATION 

men,  and  its  principal  piece  of  equipment  was  a  motor  truck. 
From  each  cemetery  the  collection  parties  ordinarily  started 
out  each  morning  before  daybreak,*  each  party  taking  half  a 
dozen  empty  coffins  on  its  truck.  The  officer  in  command  had 
with  him  cards  showing  the  location  of  the  bodies  to  be  dis- 
interred and  transferred.  Sometimes  the  party  could  obtain  all 
six  bodies  from  a  single  place,  but  more  often  it  was  neces- 
sary to  visit  four,  five,  or  even  six  places  to  get  the  whole 
gruesome  load.  It  was  an  experience  common  enough  for  a 
collection  party  which  had  started  out  before  daybreak  not  to 
get  back  to  the  concentration  cemetery  until  after  midnight. 
In  this  way,  20,000  officers  and  enlisted  men,  operating  2,000 
trucks,  worked  for  months,  until  at  the  end  they  had  visited 
40,000  graves,  scattered  over  90,000  square  kilometers  of 
ground,  and  had  removed  all  the  bodies  to  new  graves  in 
concentration  cemeteries. 

The  American  concentration  cemeteries  designed  to  be  per- 
manent resting  places  for  the  bodies  of  such  American  soldiers 
as  are  to  remain  where  they  fell,  are  hundreds  in  number.  The 
principal  ones,  their  locations,  and  the  number  of  American 
soldiers  buried  in  each  (December  31,  1919),  are  as  follows: 


Name 

Location 

Number  of  burials 

Argonne 

Romagne 

23,061 

St.  Mihiel 

Thiaucourt 

4.233 

Sedan 

Letanne 

774 

Seringes-et-Nesles 

Seringes-et-Nesles 

(Aisne) 

3.792 

Belleau 

Belleau   (Aisne) 

2,045 

Ploisy 

Ploisy  (Aisne) 

1.954 

Fismes 

Fismes  (Aisne) 

1,712 

Juvigny 

Juvigny  (Aisne) 

411 

Bony 

Bony  (Aisne) 

1.766 

Waereghem 

Waereghem   (Belg 

ium) 

689 

Villers-Tournelle 

Villers-Tournelle 

(Somme) 

549 

Bouvillers 

Bouvillers  (Oise) 

297 

Vaux-sur-Somme 

Vaux  (Somme) 

234 

*  This  work  was  practically  all  done  after  the  date  of  the  armistice  and 
before  the  advent  of  spring  in  1919 — in  other  words,  during  the  time  of  the 
year  when  the  days  are  short  and  the  nights  long. 


PICKING  UP  AFTER  THE  ARMY  89 

In  addition,  357  Americans  were  buried  in  the  British  mili- 
tary cemetery  at  St.  Souplet,  Nord,  and  122  others  in  the 
British  military  cemetery  at  Poperinghe,  Belgium. 

All  of  the  cemeteries  named  above  were  carefully  located 
in  the  first  place  and  carefully  planned  thereafter,  art  aiding 
nature  in  making  them  fit  places  for  the  permanent  interment 
of  American  soldiers.  In  addition  to  them  there  were  hundreds 
of  others,  laid  out  on  a  smaller  scale,  but  no  less  carefully 
planned.  When  the  concentration  cemeteries  were  filled, 
American  soldier  dead  lay  sleeping  in  many  American  national 
cemeteries  on  foreign  soil — in  rugged  Scotland,  on  the  Irish 
coast,  in  peaceful  English  villages,  in  sunny  Italian  fields, 
under  the  snows  of  North  Russia  and  of  Siberia,  in  Germany 
and  in  Austria,  and  along  the  whole  battle  front  in  France 
and  Belgium. 

In  its  search  for  bodies  the  Graves  Registration  Service  came 
upon  one  common  grave  at  Cirey,  a  village  which  had  been 
held  by  the  Germans.  This  grave  was  marked  with  a  wooden 
cross  bearing  the  legend  in  German:  "75  tapfere  Amerikaner''' 
(15  brave  Americans).  The  French  inhabitants  of  Cirey  swore 
under  oath  that  these  men  had  been  prisoners  massacred  in  cold 
blood  by  machine-gun  fire.  A  complete  investigation,  however, 
made  it  seem  likely  that  the  villagers  were  merely  repeating 
rumors,  and  led  to  the  conclusion  that  the  Americans  had  been 
members  of  a  raiding  party  which,  being  surrounded,  had  pre- 
ferred death  to  surrender.  After  a  long  investigation  the 
Graves  Registration  Service  succeeded  in  identifying  all  the 
bodies  in  the  common  grave.  All  fifteen  were  given  separate 
burials. 

Upon  the  Graves  Registration  Service  fell  the  duty  of  iden- 
tifying the  unknown  dead,  and  in  this  work  it  rendered  one  of 
its  most  valuable  services.  The  work  was  essentially  detective 
work,  the  following  up  of  clues  and  the  assembling  of  circum- 
stantial evidence.  The  case  of  L — ,  an  aviator,  demonstrates 
the  methods  used.  The  men  of  the  Service  found  behind  the 
former  German  lines  a  grave  containing  a  body  which  had 
apparently  been  stripped  of  every  identifying  mark.  The  cross 


90  DEMOBILIZATION 

on  the  grave  designated  the  occupant  thereof  merely  as  "A 
brave  American."  The  graves  registration  officers,  examining 
the  body  minutely,  found,  pushed  up  so  high  on  one  arm  that 
it  had  evidently  not  been  seen  by  the  Germans,  a  wrist  watch 
engraved  with  the  name  L — .  A  subsequent  investigation 
showed  that  one  L — ,  an  American  aviator,  had  fallen  to  the 
ground  within  the  German  lines  at  about  that  spot;  and  thus 
the  identification  was  made  certain. 

A  much  more  remarkable  feat  was  the  identification  of  the 
body  of  Private  Walter  L — ,  a  former  member  of  one  of  the 
infantry  regiments  of  the  First  Division.  Near  the  isolated 
grave  of  an  unknown  American  at  Ploisy  one  of  the  graves 
registration  men  found  on  the  ground  an  old,  faded,  water- 
soaked,  and  nearly  illegible  letter  addressed  to  the  single  name 
"Walter"  by  one  who  was  evidently  a  sister  living  in  Cali- 
fornia. The  Graves  Registration  Service  communicated  with 
this  woman  and  learned  that  her  brother  was  Private  L — ,  of 
the Infantry.  The  chaplain  of  that  regiment  offered  evi- 
dence that  L —  had  been  killed  in  action  near  the  place  of  the 
unknown  grave.  Thus  another  grave  was  identified. 

Second  Lieutenant  T — ,  an  aviator,  was  killed  in  action 
early  in  November,  1918.  The  Graves  Registration  Service 
found  a  lonely  grave  in  the  commune  of  Letanne  marked 
"Unknown  First  Lieutenant,  A.  S.,  U.  S.  A."  The  body  was 
examined.  The  uniform  bore  the  mark  of  a  manufacturing 
tailor  at  Rochester,  New  York.  A  letter  to  this  tailor  from  the 
Graves  Registration  Service  induced  him  to  make  an  inde- 
pendent investigation  among  the  retailers  who  had  sold  his 
uniforms  during  the  war.  About  three  hundred  retail  clothing 
establishments  answered  to  his  enquiry.  Several  dealers,  judg- 
ing from  the  description  of  the  dead  man,  thought  they  might 
have  sold  him  the  uniform;  but  one  retailer  in  Texas  said  he 
had  sold  a  uniform  to  a  man  answering  the  description,  who 
was  then  an  aviation  cadet  in  training.  His  name  was  T — . 
This  seemed  to  the  Graves  Registration  Service  to  be  a  good 
clue.  Pursuing  the  line  of  enquiry  in  the  Air  Service,  the  Serv- 
ice established  that  T —  had  been  last  seen  alive  flying  toward 


PICKING  UP  AFTER  THE  ARMY  91 

Letanne,  and,  since  he  never  returned  from  that  flight,  he 
might  have  been  shot  down  at  Letanne.  This  circumstantial 
evidence  together  with  other  corroboratory  details,  justified 
the  Graves  Registration  Service  in  identifying  the  unknown 
dead  man  as  T — . 

Upon  the  Graves  Registration  Service  fell  the  duty  of  com- 
municating with  the  kinsfolk  of  fallen  American  soldiers  to 
learn  their  wishes  as  to  the  final  disposition  of  the  remains. 
The  Service  sent  out  nearly  75,000  letters  to  the  relatives  of 
deceased  soldiers.  In  reply  44,000  asked  for  the  return  of 
bodies  to  the  United  States;  19,000  expressed  willingness  to 
leave  the  bodies  in  Europe ;  and  some  300  others  requested  the 
removal  of  bodies  to  cemeteries  in  countries  other  than  the 
United  States.  The  rest  did  not  reply. 

On  the  first  anniversary  of  the  signing  of  the  armistice  a 
transport  reached  New  York  bringing  the  bodies  of  115 
American  soldiers  who  had  died  on  foreign  soil.  These  bodies, 
the  remains  of  men  who  had  died  in  northern  Russia,  were  the 
first  to  come  home.  The  French  law  prohibited  the  disinter- 
ment and  shipment  of  bodies  until  after  the  expiration  of  a 
considerable  period  of  time  after  burial,  and  for  that  reason 
the  return  of  remains  to  the  United  States  did  not  begin  imme- 
diately. At  present  (1921)  frequent  shiploads  of  bodies  are 
arriving  in  the  United  States.  They  are  received  at  New  York 
and  from  there  they  are  transported  under  military  guard  to 
the  cemeteries  chosen  for  their  final  resting  places. 


CHAPTER  VII 
SOLDIER  WELFARE 

THE  World  War  brought  to  America  a  new  and  en- 
lightened discernment  of  the  Government's  responsi- 
bility toward  the  men  whom  it  had  called  to  the 
uniform.  In  former  wars  the  military  hierarchies  had,  in  effect, 
regarded  the  individual  soldier  as  a  piece  of  cannon  bait;  and 
when  he  was  no  longer  able  to  serve  this  purpose,  they  were 
done  with  him.  In  the  World  War  the  attitude  of  the  Govern- 
ment toward  its  four  million  soldiers  was  much  less  imper- 
sonal, much  more  paternalistic.  Its  first  solicitude  was,  to  be 
sure,  the  soldier's  expertness  as  a  soldier,  but  after  that  came 
a  real  and  helpful  regard  for  his  physical,  mental,  moral,  and 
economic  well-being. 

Particularly  was  this  true  after  the  armistice.  Before  that 
day  the  various  welfare  activities  conducted  by  the  Army  and 
its  auxiliaries  had  been  mainly  directed  to  the  end  that  the 
soldier  might  be  made  physically  and  morally  fit  as  a  fighter. 
After  the  armistice  the  undertakings  in  soldier  welfare  began 
looking  to  the  time  when  the  troops  would  resume  their  places 
in  the  workaday  world  once  more. 

W^hen  the  fighting  stopped,  the  American  Expeditionary 
Forces  faced  a  long  interval  which  was  bound  to  elapse  be- 
fore the  shipping  of  the  United  States  could  possibly  repatriate 
the  two  million  Americans  in  France.  This  might  easily  have 
been  a  period  of  stagnation  for  the  temporary  exiles.  Those 
in  command,  however,  seized  the  opportunity  to  establish 
within  the  A.  E.  F.  a  vast  school  system.  Wherever  American 
soldiers  were  quartered  in  any  numbers,  classes  were  organized 
and  instruction  proceeded,  the  curriculum  including  practically 


SOLDIER  WELFARE  93 

the  entire  range  of  subjects  taught  in  the  public  schools  of  the 
United  States,  from  the  three  elementary  R's  to  the  Latin  and 
algebra  of  the  high  schools.  Those  who  desired  it  could  re- 
ceive instruction  in  trade  and  business  subjects.  As  an  auxiliary 
to  this  system  the  Young  Men's  Christian  Association  con- 
ducted at  its  huts  courses  similar  to  those  given  by  that  organi- 
zation in  its  buildings  in  this  country.  A  surprising  amount 
of  illiteracy  was  discovered  among  the  troops  raised  in  1917 
and  1918,  foreign-born  soldiers  being  classed  as  illiterates  if 
they  could  not  read  and  write  the  English  language,  even 
though  they  might  be  proficient  in  reading  and  writing  their 
own.  It  is  estimated  that,  during  this  period  when  the  expedi- 
tion was  waiting  for  the  ships  to  take  it  home,  100,000  men 
of  the  A.  E.  F.  were  taught  to  read  and  write  English. 

The  public  school  system  of  the  A.  E.  F.,  to  call  it  that,  was 
rounded  out  by  a  great  soldiers'  university  established  after 
the  armistice  at  Beaune.  In  the  ranks  of  the  expedition  were 
thousands  of  young  men  who,  in  order  to  join  the  Army,  had 
interrupted  their  studies  in  colleges  and  other  institutions  of 
higher  education  in  America.  For  these  and  for  others  to  whom 
it  was  practicable  to  give  such  training,  the  General  Head- 
quarters of  the  expedition  organized  the  A.  E.  F.  University, 
occupying  French  army  barracks,  schools,  and  other  public 
and  private  buildings  at  the  town  of  Beaune.  A  large  faculty 
was  recruited  almost  entirely  from  the  men  in  uniform,  al- 
though a  few  college  professors  came  from  the  United  States 
to  assist  in  the  work.  The  faculty  organized  a  curriculum  which 
in  scope  would  do  credit  to  any  large  university  in  the  United 
States.  About  10,000  soldiers  registered  as  students.  Distinc- 
tions of  rank  ended  at  the  classroom  doors,  and  it  was  not 
uncommon  to  see  private  soldiers  conducting  classes  in  which 
sat  officers  of  as  high  rank  as  lieutenant  colonel.  The  univer- 
sity's brief  career  ended  with  the  advent  of  the  summer  of 
1919.  Colonel  Ira  L.  Reeves  was  president  of  the  university. 

Besides  these  educational  advantages,  the  A.  E.  F.  ar- 
ranged for  scholarships  for  some  of  its  men  at  various  French 
and    English    universities.    Practically    every    university    in 


94  DEMOBILIZATION 

France,  including  the  Sorbonne,  admitted  designated  A.  E.  F. 
soldiers  to  its  classes  during  that  winter  and  spring,  as  did  also 
Oxford  and  other  famous  educational  institutions  in  England. 
Brigadier  General  Robert  I.  Rees  was  in  charge  of  all  educa- 
tional activities  of  the  A.  E.  F. 

Yet  it  was  not  all  study  and  work  and  no  play  for  the  men 
of  the  A.  E.  F.  during  the  waiting  time  after  the  armistice. 
Athletics  were  organized  on  a  tremendous  scale.  Near  Paris 
the  expedition  established  a  great  athletic  field,  called  the 
Pershing  Stadium.  There,  in  the  spring  of  1919,  were  held  the 
military  athletic  championship  contests,  to  which  the  British, 
.French,  and  other  armies  of  the  Allies  sent  their  competing 
teams.  Military  drilling  after  the  armistice  became  competi- 
tive in  spirit,  and  out  of  such  competition  came  the  crack  drill 
regiment  of  the  Third  Army  Corps,  known  as  "Pershing's 
Own  Regiment,"  which  paraded  with  the  First  Division  in 
New  York  and  Washington  in  September,  1919.  The  drill 
regiment  was  organized  and  trained  by  Colonel  Conrad  S. 
Babcock.  Nearly  every  division  in  France  conducted  a  horse 
show  after  the  armistice.  The  expedition  numbered  among  its 
members  men  of  high  talent  in  almost  all  callings,  including 
that  of  the  stage.  At  Tours  the  A.  E.  F.  organized  an  expert 
theatrical  producing  company,  the  performances  of  which 
equaled  in  merit  the  productions  seen  on  the  American  stage. 
This  central  troupe  also  conducted  a  training  school  for  ama- 
teur actors  of  the  expedition.  The  various  areas  in  which  the 
American  soldiers  were  concentrated  sent  their  local  Thespians 
to  Tours  for  training,  after  which  they  returned  to  their  sta- 
tions to  organize  and  produce  plays.  It  was  a  small  community 
indeed  which  did  not  have  its  theatrical  performances  at  regu- 
lar intervals.  The  taste  of  producers  and  audiences  alike  ran 
strongly  to  musical  comedies. 

There  was  nothing  which  contributed  more  to  the  welfare 
of  the  men  of  the  American  Expeditionary  Forces,  or  to  their 
spirit  and  morale,  than  the  Stars  and  Stripes^  the  service  news- 
paper of  the  A.  E.  F.  This  unique  adjunct  to  a  modern  army 
originated  in  the  ranks,  was  written,  edited,  and  published  by 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

COLONEL  IRA  L.  REEVES,  PRESIDENT  OF  BEAUNE 
UNIVERSITY 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

STUDENTS  AT  BEAUNE  UNIVERSITY 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

ART  STUDENTS  IN  A.  E.  F.  TRAINING  CENTER,  PARIS 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

A.  E.  F.  STUDENTS  IN  UNIVERSITY  OF  LYON 


SOLDIER  WELFARE  95 

men  from  the  ranks,  and  to  the  end  of  its  famous  existence  was 
primarily  and  always  the  organ  of  the  enlisted  man,  with  the 
enlisted  man's  point  of  view.  No  other  army  in  Europe  pos- 
sessed an  expeditionary  newspaper,  but  it  is  unlikely  that  any 
great  American  army  of  the  future  will  ever  be  without  one. 
The  value  of  the  Stars  and  Stripes  was  beyond  dispute. 

Three  men — Private  Hudson  Hawley,  Field  Clerk  James 
A.  Britt,  and  Corporal  John  T.  Winterich — were  the  founders 
of  the  Stars  and  Stripes.  All  three  had  had  training  in  the 
making  of  newspapers — Winterich  had  been  one  of  the  edi- 
tors of  the  Springfield  Republican.  At  Neufchateau  one  winter 
night  early  in  1918  these  three  foregathered  to  descant  upon 
the  growing  American  Expeditionary  Forces  and — like  the 
fraternity  of  reporters  the  world  over — to  talk  shop ;  and  these 
men  agreed  that  the  chief  need  of  the  expedition  was  an  agency 
which  might  put  the  various  American  military  elements  in 
France  in  touch  with  each  other,  tell  every  man  what  the 
expanding  force  was  like  and  what  it  was  trying  to  do,  and 
build  homogeneity  and  singleness  of  purpose  within  the  expe- 
dition such  as  no  other  agency  could  evoke — in  short,  the 
A.  E.  F.  needed  a  newspaper.  The  idea  was  communicated  to 
General  Pershing,  who  promptly  approved  it.  Thus  was  the 
Stars  and  Stripes  officially  bom. 

The  first  number  was  published  in  Paris  on  February  8, 
1918,  and  regularly  every  Friday  thereafter  the  paper  ap- 
peared until  June  13,  1919,  when  it  was  discontinued,  and  the 
editorial  staff  joined  the  homeward  migration.  At  its  summit 
of  popularity  the  Stars  and  Stripes  attained  to  a  circulation  of 
526,000,  which  was  close  to  the  permitted  limit  of  one  copy 
for  every  three  soldiers  in  the  expedition,  a  stricture  made 
necessary  by  the  shortage  of  paper  in  Europe.  This  was  all 
paid  circulation,  obtained  without  direct  solicitation  other 
than  the  advertising  appearing  in  the  paper  itself.  The  Stars 
and  Stripes  was  printed  in  the  Paris  plant  of  the  London  Daily 
Mail.  The  total  net  profit  earned  by  the  newspaper  was  about 
$700,000,  a  sum  which  went  to  the  credit  of  the  Quartermaster 
Department.  After  the  armistice  the  collectors  in  America 


96  DEMOBILIZATION 

awoke  to  the  historical  value  of  this  publication  and  offered 
large  sums  for  the  few  complete  files  which  had  been  saved. 

At  about  the  third  issue  of  the  Stars  and  Stripes  Private 
Harold  W.  Ross,  who  had  had  an  extensive  experience  as  an 
executive  in  newspaper  offices  of  the  Pacific  coast,  became  the 
editor-in-chief.  The  three  originators  of  the  newspaper  were 
on  its  staff  until  the  end.  Sergeant  Alexander  Woollcott,  who 
before  and  after  his  army  experience  was  the  dramatic  critic 
of  the  New  York  Times ^  became  the  battle  correspondent  of 
the  paper.  His  accounts  of  the  engagements  in  which  the 
American  troops  appeared  were  not  excelled  by  those  of  any 
correspondent  with  the  Army.  After  the  armistice  Sergeant 
John  W.  Rixey  Smith  joined  the  staff.  These  names  all  be- 
came well  known  to  the  men  of  the  A.  E.  F.  Nor  should  the 
two  artists,  C.  LeRoy  Baldridge  and  A.  B.  Wallgren,  both 
private  soldiers,  be  forgotten.  Their  work  on  the  Stars  and 
Stripes  resulted  in  fame  and  fortune  for  both  of  them.  The 
latter,  as  "Wally,"  made  himself,  with  his  whimsical  nonsense, 
about  the  most  popular  figure  in  the  American  Expeditionary 
Forces.  Baldridge  was  the  possessor  of  a  delicate  and  subtle 
talent.  Practically  unknown  in  his  own  country  before  the 
war,  he  returned  after  it  to  take  his  place  among  the  foremost 
American  illustrators. 

These  and  other  men  connected  with  the  publication  were 
formally  organized  as  a  unit  of  the  A.  E.  F.,  bearing  the  name 
1st  Censor  and  Press  Company.  The  officers  in  charge  were 
Major  Mark  Watson  and  Captain  Stephen  T.  Early,  both  of 
them  experienced  in  newspaper  work. 

The  military  authorities  granted  an  extraordinary  editorial 
freedom  to  the  Stars  and  Stripes.  At  one  time  the  paper  was 
making  a  satirical  onslaught  against  the  army  practice  of 
fencing  off  the  rank  and  file  from  the  more  desirable  cafes 
and  other  gathering  places  with  the  placard  "Officers  Only." 
A  high  general  of  the  expedition  took  umbrage  at  this  cam- 
paign and  sent  to  the  publication  office  a  peremptory  order  for 
the  attack  to  cease.  The  editorial  staff  at  once  appealed  to 
General  Pershing,  who  replied  with  a  written  order  that  there 


SOLDIER  WELFARE  97 

was  to  be  no  interference  with  the  editorial  direction  of  the 
Stars  and  Stripes.  With  such  a  charter  the  Stars  and  Stripes 
threw  itself  whole-heartedly  into  various  projects  for  the  good 
of  the  A.  E.  F.  and  its  personnel.  Its  chief  military  contribu- 
tion was  its  "Berlin  or  Bust"  campaign,  undertaken  in  the 
summer  and  autumn  of  1918.  In  this  it  directed  its  energies 
chiefly  to  the  improvement  of  the  unloading  efficiency  at  the 
American  ports  in  France.  By  citing  publicly  the  labor  units 
which  made  good  records  in  the  unloading  of  vessels,  the  news- 
paper created,  among  the  stevedore  troops,  a  spirit  of  com- 
petition which  had  a  marked  effect  upon  the  efficiency  of  the 
ports.  The  newspaper  induced  American  troop  units  in  France 
to  "adopt"  for  one  year  more  than  3,000  orphans  of  deceased 
French  soldiers,  and  many  of  the  units  continued  their  guard- 
ianship after  they  returned  to  America.  In  this  campaign  the 
Stars  and  Stripes  raised  over  500,000  francs  for  the  care  of 
French  war  orphans,  and  most  of  this  money  was  contributed 
by  men  in  the  trenches.  The  newspaper  also  conducted  a  service 
department  in  which  it  answered  more  than  500,000  enquiries 
coming  from  American  soldiers.  After  the  armistice  it  co- 
operated in  the  expedition's  educational  enterprise. 

In  this  volume,  however,  we  are  not  so  much  interested  in 
welfare  activities  within  the  Army  as  we  are  with  those  which 
bore  directly  upon  the  difficult  business  of  demobilizing  the 
troops  without  shock  to  the  economic  organization  of  the 
country.  The  activities  in  soldier  welfare  directly  connected 
with  demobilization  were  of  two  classes — those  benefiting  the 
sick  and  wounded  and  those  helpful  to  the  able-bodied. 

To  the  officers  and  enlisted  men  of  the  Medical  Corps  in 
this  country  the  armistice  meant  only  an  increase  of  work. 
Therefore,  in  common  with  the  other  military  departments 
the  personnel  of  which  after  the  armistice  could  see  no  imme- 
diate prospects  of  discharge,  the  Medical  Department  experi- 
enced a  sharp  drop  in  corps  morale.  Many  of  the  officers  and 
enlisted  men  attempted  to  get  out  at  once,  and  some  of  them 
succeeded,  but  for  the  most  part  they  were  held  in  uniform; 
and  later,  when  the  men  realized  how  badly  their  services  were 


98  DEMOBILIZATION 

needed  and  what  good  they  were  accomplishing,  they  became 
contented  and  worked  with  good  spirit  until  the  corps  could  be 
placed  on  its  permanent  peace  footing. 

While  the  Army  was  expanding,  the  most  noticeable  work 
of  the  Medical  Corps  in  this  country  had  been  that  of  examin- 
ing the  men  who  sought  entrance  to  the  training  camps,  sort- 
ing out  the  physically  fit  from  the  unfit.  The  care  of  military 
patients  did  not  become  a  predominant  medical  activity  in  the 
United  States  until  the  late  summer  of  1918,  when,  simulta- 
neously, the  A.  E.  F.  began  sending  home  its  first  shiploads  of 
wounded  men  and  the  influenza  epidemic  invaded  the  train- 
ing camps.  Meanwhile  the  care  of  war's  disabled  had  taken  on 
a  new  meaning  for  the  American  military  medical  authorities. 
In  former  wars,  as  soon  as  a  sick  man  or  a  wounded  man  had 
gained  strength  enough  to  travel,  he  was  usually  furloughed  to 
his  home,  there  to  win  his  own  way  back  to  health  if  he  could. 
In  the  summer  of  1918  the  War  Department  adopted  the  pol- 
icy of  not  discharging  disabled  men  from  the  Service  until  they 
were  as  nearly  rehabilitated  physically  as  medical  science  could 
make  them;  and  even  then  a  patient  was  not  turned  adrift, 
but  might  seek  the  services  of  other  governmental  agencies  for 
specialized  treatment  and  for  reeducation  that  should  enable 
him  to  take  a  place  in  civilian  life  at  least  as  useful  as  the  one 
he  had  left  in  order  to  join  the  military  service.  This  policy 
had  a  marked  effect  upon  the  layout  of  the  machinery  which 
conducted  the  demobilization  of  the  Army.  It  not  only  re- 
sulted in  maintaining  the  Medical  Corps,  equipment  and  per- 
sonnel^ at  war  strength  for  many  months  after  the  armistice, 
but  it  also  set  up  within  the  Government  great  new  agencies 
for  carrying  out  the  Government's  beneficent  purposes  toward 
the  ex-service  men. 

On  the  day  of  the  armistice  there  were  200,000  patients  in 
the  A.  E.  F.  hospitals  in  France.  It  was  at  once  realized  that 
the  best  interests  of  these  men  demanded  their  prompt  return 
to  the  United  States;  for  nowhere  else  could  they  secure  the 
treatment  most  certain  to  restore  them  to  complete  health. 
The  Medical  Corps  at  home  was  ready  for  them.  For  months 


SOLDIER  WELFARE  99 

it  had  been  constructing  throughout  the  United  States  a  great 
chain  of  specialized  hospitals  in  anticipation  of  a  heavy- 
American  casualty  list  in  France. 

Many  of  the  200,000  hospitalized  members  of  the  A.  E.  F. 
recovered  in  time  to  recross  the  ocean  as  members  of  regu- 
lar military  units,  but  more  than  half  of  them  returned 
as  patients  needing  more  or  less  extended  treatment  in 
the  military  hospitals  in  this  country.  The  policy  in  France 
was  to  move  these  men  either  in  ambulances  or  in  hospi- 
tal trains  from  the  interior  hospitals  up  to  hospitals  near 
the  ports  of  embarkation.  There  they  were  placed  aboard  the 
special  hospital  ships  or  given  accommodations  on  the  regular 
transports.  Practically  all  of  them  debarked  either  at  New 
York  or  at  Newport  News.  New  York  could  accommodate 
24,000  patients  at  once  in  its  regular  and  special  debarkation 
hospitals.  The  two  regular  debarkation  hospitals  in  New 
York — one  located  in  the  Greenhut  Building  and  the  other  in 
the  Grand  Central  Palace — each  had  beds  for  over  3,000 
patients,  and  in  addition  the  Army  could  call  upon  thirteen 
additional  hospitals  in  New  York  in  an  emergency.  At  New- 
port News  there  was  a  regular  and  emergency  equipment  of 
10,000  hospital  beds  for  incoming  overseas  patients. 

Harbor  hospital  boats  and  ambulances  distributed  the 
patients  from  the  ships  to  the  debarkation  hospitals.  There 
they  were  classified  according  to  the  sort  of  treatment  they 
required.  There  were  eighty  interior  hospitals  which  received 
overseas  patients.  The  policy  of  the  Army  was  to  send  patients 
whenever  practicable  to  the  hospitals  nearest  their  homes.  In 
the  distribution  of  patients  from  the  ports  to  the  interior  hos- 
pitals, the  Medical  Corps  operated  four  hospital  trains — three 
out  of  Hoboken  and  one  out  of  Newport  News — and  twenty 
unit  cars,  one  of  which,  attached  to  a  train  of  regular  Pullman 
or  tourist  sleepers,  enabled  such  a  train  to  serve  as  a  moving 
hospital.  Each  of  the  regular  hospital  trains  was  made  up  of 
seven  hospital  cars,  and  carried  comfortably  141  patients  and 
31  doctors,  nurses,  and  orderlies.  The  unit  cars  were  equipped 
with  diet  kitchens,  in  which  could  be  cooked  food  enough  for 


loo  DEMOBILIZATION 

250  patients.  With  this  equipment  139,000  overseas  patients 
were  handled  up  to  the  end  of  the  year  1919,  and  of  these, 
103,000  entered  the  country  through  the  port  of  New  York. 
On  the  first  anniversary  of  the  armistice  thirty-six  of  the  eighty 
general  hospitals  had  been  closed,  an  indication  of  the  rate  of 
convalescence  among  the  military  patients. 

In  its  treatment  of  patients  in  the  military  hospitals,  the 
Medical  Department  of  the  Army  went  beyond  the  realm  of 
pure  surgery  and  medication  in  order  to  reconstruct  physically 
and  mentally,  when  necessary,  the  men  left  disabled  by  the 
war.  To  this  end  it  enlarged  its  Sanitary  Corps  to  include 
persons  skilled  in  physical  and  occupational  reconstruction. 
The  plan  permitted  the  employment  by  the  Corps  of  civilian 
women,  who,  after  putting  on  the  distinctive  blue  uniform 
adopted  for  them,  were  known  as  reconstruction  aides.  These 
women  were  skilled  in  two  branches  of  therapy — occupational 
therapy  (the  teaching  of  new  occupations  to  invalids  as  a  cura- 
tive measure)  and  physiotherapy  (including  baths  of  various 
sorts,  massage,  heat  and  electric  treatments,  and  gymnastics). 
Most  of  the  general  hospitals  were  fitted  with  workshops, 
gymnasiums,  physiotherapy  departments,  and  educational 
buildings.  An  elementary  school  system  was  inaugurated  at 
the  general  hospitals,  and  several  thousand  illiterate  patients 
were  taught  to  read  and  write  during  their  convalescence. 
Organized  recreational  activities  were  conducted  at  each  gen- 
eral hospital  engaging  in  reconstruction.  Outdoor  games,  set- 
ting-up exercises  and  other  gymnastic  exercises,  military  drills, 
and  organized  play  of  many  sorts  vied  with  concerts,  plays, 
boxing  matches,  and  other  amusements  for  the  interest  of  the 
convalescents.  One  important  work  of  the  physiotherapists  was 
to  teach  men  with  amputated  limbs  how  to  dress,  feed,  and 
otherwise  care  for  themselves,  and  how  to  use  the  artificial  legs 
or  arms  which  the  Government  supplied  to  them.  Nineteen 
former  training  camps  were  converted  into  convalescent  centers 
operated  by  the  Medical  Department.  To  these  places  the 
general   hospitals   sent    50,000   convalescent   soldiers   to   be 


\^  ^     tilfLlf' 


amX^ESmL^^JI 


Photo  from   Engineer  Department 


AIR  VIEW  OF  PERSHING  STADIUM,  PARIS 


Photo  by  Signal  Coij'S 

AMERICAN  SOLDIERS  AT  UNIVERSITY  OF  GRENOBLE 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

A.  E.  F.  SOLDIERS  AS  COMEDIANS 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

JUDGING  COMEDY  HORSE  AT  4TH  ARMY  HORSE  SHOW 


SOLDIER  WELFARE  loi 

finally  hardened  by  curative  work  and  play  for  their  reentrance 
into  civilian  life. 

After  patients  were  finally  discharged  from  the  Army  and 
from  the  army  hospitals,  the  Government  by  no  means  washed 
its  hands  of  them.  Congress  had  set  up  three  great  new  federal 
agencies  looking  to  the  welfare  of  the  discharged  soldier.  One 
of  these  was  the  Bureau  of  War  Risk  Insurance,  which,  in 
addition  to  offering  low-priced  life  insurance  policies  of  the 
standard  sorts  to  all  ex-service  men,  determined,  granted,  and 
paid  the  monthly  allowances  given  by  the  Government  to  all 
Americans  disabled  by  service  in  the  uniform  during  the  World 
War.  Then,  too,  Congress  had  greatly  enlarged  the  function 
of  the  old  Public  Health  Service  by  making  it  responsible  for 
the  medical  care  of  all  ex-service  men  discharged  from  the 
Army  or  Navy  and  from  the  military  hospitals  but  still  need- 
ing attention  on  account  of  disabilities  incurred  during  the 
war.  Finally,  Congress  established  by  law  the  Federal  Board 
for  Vocational  Education,  an  act  which  outdid  in  gratitude 
and  generosity  anything  which  the  American  Government  had 
ever  before  offered  to  disabled  war  veterans. 

After  the  Public  Health  Service  began  expanding  its  facili- 
ties for  the  care  of  disabled  veterans,  the  Medical  Department 
adopted  the  policy  of  discharging  its  patients  rapidly  and  turn- 
ing them  over  to  the  Public  Health  Service.  Not  only  were 
those  two  classes  of  war  victims  requiring  extended  medical 
treatment — the  mental  and  nervous  cases  and  those  suffering 
with  tuberculosis — so  treated,  but  men  still  suffering  from 
wounds  and  sometimes  requiring  major  operations  and  long 
periods  for  convalescence  thereafter  were  released  from  the 
Army  and  committed  to  the  ministrations  of  the  Public  Health 
Service.  The  immediate  result  of  such  a  transfer  was  to  entitle 
the  disabled  soldier  to  receive  from  the  Government  his  dis- 
ability allowance,  which  could  be  paid  only  after  a  man's  dis- 
charge from  the  military  service,  and  it  often  allowed  him 
to  secure  medical  care  in  the  vicinity  of  his  own  home. 
Another  important  result  was  that,  during  1920,  although 
thousands  of  the  victims  of  the  war  still  required  constant 


102  DEMOBILIZATION 

medical  attention,  the  Medical  Service  of  the  Army  rapidly 
contracted  toward  its  prewar  proportions,  with  a  consequent 
expansion  of  the  branch  of  the  Public  Health  Service  which 
dealt  with  disabled  veterans. 

There  was  not  nearly  so  much  tuberculosis  in  the  Army  as 
the  medical  authorities  had  anticipated.  In  the  expectation  of 
a  wide  prevalence  of  the  disease  resulting  from  the  severity  of 
field  conditions  in  France,  the  Medical  Corps  established  nine 
tuberculosis  hospitals  in  the  United  States.  Afterwards,  al- 
though 100,000  of  the  4,000,000  men  were  sent  to  hospitals 
as  tuberculosis  suspects,  the  positive  diagnosis  of  pulmonary 
tuberculosis  was  confirmed  in  less  than  15,000  cases.  The 
result  was  that  at  no  time  did  the  Army  use  more  than  seven 
of  its  tuberculosis  hospitals,  and  after  it  adopted  the  policy 
of  discharging  tubercular  patients  on  certificates  of  disability 
it  maintained  only  two  of  these  hospitals.  Discontent  and 
homesickness  are  deterrents  to  the  cure  of  tuberculosis,  and 
the  Medical  Corps  generally  allowed  sufferers  from  the  disease 
to  continue  their  own  cures  at  home  under  instructions  or  to 
enter  the  hospitals  and  sanitariums  of  the  Public  Health 
Service  near  their  own  homes. 

The  other  class  of  disabled  ex-service  men  in  need  of  ex- 
tended medical  treatment  were  the  nervous  and  mental  cases. 
Such  victims  were  turned  over  to  the  Public  Health  Service, 
and  they  constituted  the  largest  class  of  cases  treated  by  that 
agency  after  the  armistice. 

After  a  disabled  man  was  discharged  from  the  Service,  he 
automatically  became  eligible  for  vocational  rehabilitation 
under  the  direction  of  the  Federal  Board  for  Vocational  Educa- 
tion. The  only  four  conditions  were  that  the  man  must  have 
been  honorably  discharged  after  April  7,  1917,  that  he  must 
have  a  disability  incurred  in,  aggravated  by,  or  traceable  to, 
the  military  service,  that  the  disability  must  be,  in  the  opinion 
of  the  Federal  Board,  an  actual  vocational  handicap  to  him, 
and,  lastly,  that  vocational  training  was  a  feasible  thing  for 
him.  In  other  words — to  clarify  the  final  condition — the  Voca- 
tional Board  would  not  give  training  to  a  lunatic  or  give  train- 


SOLDIER  WELFARE  103 

ing  of  any  sort  beyond  a  man's  mental  capabilities.  Within 
these  necessary  restrictions,  however,  there  was  practically  no 
limit  to  which  the  Federal  Board  could  not  go.  Most  of  its  bene- 
ficiaries, to  be  sure,  received  training  in  the  purely  mechanical 
vocations  in  shops  and  factories;  but  the  Board  could  and  did 
send  men  to  colleges  and  even  to  the  postgraduate  schools  of 
universities.  The  objective  of  the  Board  was  not  only  to  over- 
come by  training  the  man's  physical  handicap,  but  also  to  carry 
him  forward  in  training  as  long  as  his  progress  and  his  mental- 
ity warranted  it.  More  than  one  war  veteran  found  that  his 
disability  brought  to  him  educational  opportunities  which 
might  otherwise  never  have  come  his  way.  The  Board  possessed 
funds  to  pay  not  only  for  tuition,  textbooks,  and  incidental 
expenses,  but  also  for  the  maintenance  of  the  student  and  his 
family,  if  he  had  one,  while  he  was  in  training.  According  to 
the  number  of  persons  dependent  upon  the  student,  the  Board 
was  authorized  to  pay  for  maintenance  as  much  as  $150  a 
month.  At  first  the  disabled  men  were  slow  to  make  application 
for  vocational  training;  but,  once  they  understood  the  advan- 
tages which  were  theirs  for  the  asking,  there  was  a  great  rush 
to  avail  themselves  of  the  opportunities  thus  freely  offered  by 
the  Government. 

The  three  rehabilitation  services,  though  interdependent  in 
their  operation,  were  independent  of  each  other  in  their  man- 
agement and  control.  The  Public  Health  Service  conducted 
the  physical  examinations  on  which  the  War  Risk  Bureau 
rated  men  for  their  disability  allowances.  The  War  Risk 
Bureau  certified  men  to  the  Public  Health  Service  for  medical 
treatment,  and  for  vocational  training  to  the  Federal  Board  for 
Vocational  Education.  A  man  could  not  legally  receive  his 
disability  allowance  from  the  War  Risk  Bureau  while  re- 
ceiving a  training  maintenance  allowance  from  the  Federal 
Board.  While  in  effect,  therefore,  conducting  three  branches  in 
the  single  main  enterprise  of  caring  for  the  men  left  disabled 
by  the  war,  the  three  federal  agencies  were  independent  in  their 
executive  managements.  This  anomalous  arrangement  resulted 
in  such  distressing  delays  and  stirred  up  so  much  discontent 


1 04  DEMOBILIZATION 

among  the  ex-service  men  that  in  the  spring  of  1921,  upon  the 
insistence  largely  of  the  American  Legion,  the  veterans'  own 
organization,  the  three  services  were  brought  together  under 
a  single  direction. 

The  agitation  which  led  to  the  amalgamation  of  the  three 
welfare  services  undoubtedly  created  a  wide  impression  that 
the  Government  had  neglected  the  ex-service  men.  Nothing 
could  have  been  farther  from  the  truth.  The  complaint  was 
not  against  the  generosity  of  the  Government,  but  against  the 
method  of  administering  that  generosity.  It  was  often  difficult 
for  the  ex-service  man  to  obtain  the  benefits  which  Congress 
had  provided  for  him.  The  lavishness  of  the  hand  of  Congress 
is  shown  by  the  fact  that  up  to  the  present  (June,  1921)  its 
appropriations  of  money  for  ex-service  men  have  amounted  in 
sum  to  about  $800,000,000.  This  is  more  money  than  the  Gov- 
ernment provided  for  veterans  of  the  Civil  War  during  the  first 
thirty  years  after  the  conclusion  of  that  conflict.  The  appro- 
priations to  date  include  the  money  for  the  physical  and  voca- 
tional rehabilitation  of  disabled  World  War  veterans,  for 
death  claims  paid  by  the  Bureau  of  War  Risk  Insurance,  and 
for  allowances  paid  by  the  War  Risk  Bureau  to  disabled  ex- 
soldiers,  but  they  do  not  include  the  sixty-dollar  bonus  paid 
to  all  ex-service  men  in  1919.  This  bonus  accounted  for  about 
$200,000,000  of  the  Government's  money.  Altogether,  there- 
fore, the  Government  has  either  paid  out  or  obligated  itself  to 
pay  out  about  one  billion  dollars  for  the  benefit  of  men  who 
served  in  the  American  forces  during  the  World  War. 

So  much  for  the  post-armistice  care  of  the  wounded  and 
otherwise  disabled.  The  other  principal  phase  of  welfare  work 
for  the  Army  after  the  armistice  had  to  do  with  the  able- 
bodied  soldiers;  and,  concretely,  it  meant  getting  jobs  for  them. 
The  War  Department  did  not  regard  a  soldier  as  completely 
demobilized  until  he  was  once  more  placed  in  an  occupation  in 
civilian  life.  The  Department  could  exercise  no  authority  over 
the  veteran  once  he  had  received  his  discharge,  but  it  could  and 
did  exercise  a  friendly  solicitude  as  to  his  economic  future. 
Therefore  the  War  Department  led  a  nation-wide  movement 


SOLDIER  WELFARE  105 

under  the  slogan,  "Jobs  for  Soldiers" — and  that  meant  jobs 
for  approximately  4,000,000  men  thrown  suddenly  into  the 
labor  market  just  at  the  time  when  industry  was  going  through 
the  critical  transition  from  war  to  peace. 

In  demobilizing  the  men  of  the  Army,  the  War  Department 
adopted  a  policy  the  diametric  opposite  of  the  British  policy 
of  discharging  soldiers  by  trades  as  they  were  needed  in  indus- 
try. With  our  enormous  and  varied  industry,  we  had  every- 
thing in  our  favor  to  make  a  success  of  the  industrial  plan  of 
troop  demobilization;  but,  nevertheless,  the  War  Department 
settled  upon  the  questionable  policy  of  discharging  the  troops 
by  military  units,  regardless  of  the  effect  such  a  policy  might 
have  upon  general  industrial  conditions.  As  it  was,  the  United 
States  faced  an  economic  crisis  in  the  transition  of  its  war 
industry,  and  to  inundate  the  country  with  unemployed  ex- 
soldiers  was  only  to  add  to  the  difficulties  of  those  who  were 
trying  to  bring  industry  safely  through  the  readjustment. 
Later  on,  the  War  Department  modified  its  policy  by  provid- 
ing that  any  soldier  who  faced  unemployment  after  discharge 
might,  upon  his  own  request,  be  held  in  the  service  for  a  rea- 
sonable time  while  he  tried  to  locate  a  job  for  himself  in 
civilian  life,  and  that,  on  the  other  hand,  if  work  were  waiting 
for  any  man  not  yet  in  line  for  immediate  discharge,  such  a 
man  might,  upon  submitting  proper  proof  that  there  was  a 
civilian  demand  for  his  services,  receive  his  discharge  forth- 
with. The  Department  permitted  officers  to  take  thirty-day 
leaves  of  absence  with  pay  while  they  sought  work. 

There  was,  of  course,  danger  that  the  wholesale  outpouring 
of  ex-soldiers  upon  an  industrial  field  already  complaining 
of  a  labor  surplus  would  precipitate  a  business  crisis;  yet  it 
seemed  certain  that  a  wise  guidance  of  the  internal  affairs  of 
the  nation  could  avert  such  a  calamity.  The  world  was  short 
of  almost  everything  which  man  consumes,  and  it  seemed 
evident  that  it  would  take  several  years  of  brisk  production  in 
every  field  to  build  up  the  reserves  wasted  by  war  and  overtake 
industrially  the  demands  of  the  consuming  public.  It  was 
evident,  in  short,  that  there  was  plenty  of  work  for  all,  if  busi- 


1  o6  DEMOBILIZATION 

ness  did  not  become  hysterical  in  the  face  of  a  difficult  transi- 
tion. The  part  for  the  Government  to  play  was  to  conduct  a 
skillful  graduation  of  war  industry  into  the  pursuits  of  peace 
and  at  the  same  time  to  take  the  lead  with  its  own  agencies 
in  infiltrating  the  demobilized  troops  into  the  ranks  of  trade 
and  industry. 

Fortunately,  for  this  latter  purpose,  the  Government  pos- 
sessed an  agency  at  hand — the  United  States  Employment 
Service,  a  branch  of  the  Department  of  Labor.  The  war  had 
built  up  this  organization  to  great  size  and  usefulness.  Its 
branches  covered  the  United  States.  Before  the  armistice  it 
had  been  instrumental  in  staffing  some  of  the  more  important 
war  industrial  establishments,  particularly  the  new  shipyards 
and  the  government  powder  plants.  This  agency  would  have 
been  competent  alone  to  secure  employment  for  all  discharged 
soldiers,  but  for  the  circumstance  that,  in  the  spring  of  1919, 
there  came  into  office  a  Congress  of  a  political  complexion  the 
opposite  to  that  of  the  administration.  This  Congress  at  once 
adopted  a  program  of  economy,  but  it  was  a  spurious  economy 
to  the  extent  (which  was  considerable)  that  it  arbitrarily  cut 
down  appropriations  needed  for  important  projects.  The 
United  States  Employment  Service  received  a  scant  $5,000,- 
000  with  which  to  finance  the  work  of  securing  civilian  em- 
ployment for  4,000,000  men,  when  twice  that  sum  would 
not  have  been  overabundant.  The  result  was  that  in  this  final 
scene  of  the  war  the  Government  was  forced  to  call  upon  out- 
side and  volunteer  aid  in  the  conduct  of  an  essential  war 
activity. 

At  this  point  the  semi-governmental  Council  of  National 
Defense  stepped  into  the  breach.  Shorn  of  most  of  its  purely 
industrial  functions,  the  Council  of  National  Defense  had  be- 
come largely  an  organ  consolidating  and  directing  all  volun- 
teer civilian  effort  in  aid  of  the  Government  in  its  war  and 
demobilization  problems.  It  had  built  up  a  field  service  cover- 
ing the  entire  United  States,  consisting  principally  of  the  state 
and  local  councils  of  national  defense.  Meanwhile,  with  the 
expansion  of  the  United  States  Employment  Service  restricted 


SOLDIER  WELFARE  107 

by  lack  of  money,  the  Secretary  of  War  made  plans  to  use 
some  of  the  emergency  war  funds  in  the  soldier-employment 
project  and  called  to  Washington  Colonel  Arthur  Woods,  the 
former  police  commissioner  of  New  York  City,  making  him  an 
assistant  to  the  Secretary  of  War  in  charge  of  all  war  depart- 
ment activities  in  reestablishing  service  men  in  civil  life.  The 
Director  of  the  Council  of  National  Defense  created,  in  March, 
1919,  its  emergency  committee  on  employment  of  soldiers  and 
sailors,  with  Colonel  Woods  as  chairman.  The  membership  of 
the  committee  linked  up  the  United  States  Employment  Serv- 
ice and  other  interested  governmental  bodies  in  an  emergency 
organization  for  Colonel  Woods  to  command.  The  committee 
also  tied  in  all  state  and  municipal  employment  agencies,  wel- 
fare societies  everywhere  that  were  taking  part  in  the  solution 
of  the  employment  problem,  and  also  the  thousands  of  com- 
munity councils  of  national  defense.  Thus  was  evolved  in 
brief  time  a  fairly  efficient  employment  service  of  national 
scope. 

The  success  of  the  project  was  beyond  question.  The  so- 
called  bureaus  for  discharged  soldiers,  sailors,  and  marines 
were  set  up  in  practically  every  community  in  the  United 
States.  Since  the  work  was  so  largely  voluntary  work,  no 
strict  system  of  reports  was  ever  put  in  force,  but  the  figures 
from  500  principal  American  cities  and  towns  showed  that 
when  the  year  1919  ended,  1,326,000  discharged  service  men 
had  applied  to  the  employment  agencies,  and  more  than  927,- 
000  had  been  placed  in  jobs  by  the  organization.  A  general 
survey  in  the  autumn  of  1919  disclosed  only  about  20,000 
ex-service  men  out  of  work. 

The  men  of  the  A.  E.  F.  came  in  contact  with  the  Govern- 
ment's employment  organization  before  they  left  foreign  soil. 
The  United  States  Employment  Service  sent  several  represen- 
tatives to  France  soon  after  the  armistice.  These  advance 
agents  carried  cards,  which  were  distributed  to  the  troops  of 
the  expedition  as  they  came  to  the  embarkation  ports  in 
France.  With  the  cards  went  the  Government's  assurance  that 
it  would  use  every  effort  to  restore  every  soldier  to  a  useful 


io8  DEMOBILIZATION 

place  in  civil  life.  Any  soldier  who  desired  to  avail  himself 
of  these  good  offices  was  instructed  to  fill  in  a  card  during  his 
voyage  home,  telling  his  qualifications,  what  sort  of  job  he 
desired,  and  where  he  wished  to  be  employed.  Hundreds  of 
thousands  of  these  cards  were  collected  by  the  federal  em- 
ployment agents  at  the  ports  of  debarkation  in  this  country. 
The  cards  were  sorted  and  sent  to  the  proper  local  employment 
bureaus  throughout  the  United  States.  Thousands  of  men  were 
engaged  for  work  before  they  received  their  discharges.  The 
fact  that  jobs  were  waiting  for  them  undoubtedly  helped  to 
avert  the  congregating  of  idle  service  men  in  cities  after  they 
had  been  turned  off  at  the  demobilization  centers. 

The  overseas  soldier  had  been  serving  his  country  for  a 
dollar  a  day  while  others  had  stayed  at  home  in  bomb-proof 
jobs  and  drawn  the  highest  wages  ever  paid  in  America.  The 
returning  veteran  often  felt,  and  felt  justly,  that  it  was  his 
turn  now  to  reap  some  of  the  financial  rewards.  Travel  had 
broadened  these  boys ;  the  harsh  experiences  of  war  had  sobered 
them  and  often  quickened  their  ambition.  Such  men  were  not 
content  to  go  back  to  the  jobs  they  had  left  in  1917  and  1918. 
They  demanded  something  better,  and  often  they  got  it,  be- 
cause employers  were  prone  to  accept  their  point  of  view. 
Events  justified  this  attitude,  too,  as  was  testified  to  in  hun- 
dreds of  letters  received  by  the  employment  bureaus  from  satis- 
fied employers,  who  wrote  that  the  demobilized  soldiers  were 
better  and  more  ambitious  workmen  for  their  war  experiences. 

The  success  of  the  reemployment  campaign  was  largely  an 
achievement  for  publicity.  The  publicity  was  directed  both  to 
the  soldier  and  to  the  employer.  For  reaching  the  soldier  one 
of  the  most  valuable  devices  proved  to  be  a  booklet  entitled 
Where  Do  We  Go  from  Here^,  written  by  Major  William 
Brown  Meloney.  This  pamphlet  was  filled  with  good  advice 
for  the  demobilized  soldier.  It  took  into  account  his  stirred 
ambition,  but  showed  how  impossible  it  was  for  every  man  to 
get  the  place  in  civil  life  he  desired,  and  therefore  urged  each 
man  to  take  what  job  he  could  get  and  make  the  most  of  it. 


Photo  from  Federal  Board  for   Vocational  Education 

DISABLED  VETERANS  TAKING  FEDERAL  TRAINING 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

EDITORIAL  CONFERENCE  OF  STARS  AND  STRIPES 


PUT  H(;H  I  IN(;  Bl.OOD  !N  VOnil  BUSINESS-  tli^i^.l^^.^':^')^^^ 


\V,  7H     !  i 


VH'HJYMLNl    SERVICE 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

POSTER  USED  IN  REEMPLOYMENT  CAMPAIGN 


Felix  J.  Koch  Photo 

EMPLOYMENT  OFFICE  AT  CAMP  SHERMAN 


SOLDIER  WELFARE  109 

The  War  Camp  Community  Service  printed  and  distributed 
3,000,000  copies  of  this  booklet. 

The  American  Red  Cross  sponsored  a  poster  by  Dan  Smith, 
the  artist,  bearing  to  employers  the  slogan:  "Put  Fighting 
Blood  in  your  Business!"  A  file  of  helmeted  Yanks  obliquely 
below  a  shield  on  which  were  inscribed  the  names  of  the  prin- 
cipal engagements  in  which  the  A.  E.  F.  participated;  below 
that,  the  lines:  "Here's  his  record.  Does  he  get  a  job^" — such 
was  the  display. 

Publications  of  every  sort,  motion  picture  theatres,  minis- 
ters in  their  pulpits,  and  school-teachers  in  their  classrooms 
joined  in  the  effort  to  make  the  whole  United  States  think  of 
its  obligations  to  the  returning  troops.  The  War  Department 
conferred  a  so-called  citation  upon  employers  who  agreed  to 
take  back  all  of  their  former  employees  who  had  joined  the 
Army  or  Navy.  The  leading  business  organizations  of  the 
country  worked  with  their  members  to  secure  a  complete  re- 
employment of  former  service  men.  The  thoroughness  of  the 
effort  accounts  for  the  large  degree  of  its  success. 

At  the  same  time  the  War  Department  constituted  itself 
an  employment  agency  for  placing  soldiers  with  technical 
training  in  the  best  positions  that  could  be  obtained  for  them. 
Such  soldiers  were  usually  commissioned  officers.  The  Depart- 
ment asked  these  men  to  send  to  Washington  statements  of 
their  qualifications  and  their  wishes  as  to  employment.  The 
Department  then  circularized  some  25,000  business  firms  of 
the  United  States  as  to  their  needs  for  men  with  technical 
training.  By  this  method  about  8,000  men  were  placed  in 
responsible  positions  at  good  salaries. 

The  employment  organization  encountered  and  overcame 
an  abuse  of  the  army  uniform  that  was  particularly  flagrant 
for  the  first  few  months  after  the  armistice.  On  the  streets  of 
most  large  cities  were  men  in  uniform,  wearing  the  red  chev- 
ron indicating  their  honorable  discharge  from  the  service,  sell- 
ing cheap  or  worthless  articles  or  begging  outright.  There  may 
have  been  a  shadow  of  excuse  for  this  during  the  early  weeks 
of  the  winter  of  1918-1919;  but  as  industry  recovered  and 


1  lo  DEMOBILIZATION 

revived  it  became  possible  for  every  ex-service  man  who  de- 
sired a  respectable  job  to  secure  one.  Street  solicitation,  how- 
ever, was  highly  profitable,  and  many  professional  beggars 
and  sharpers,  who  had  never  been  in  the  Service  at  all,  secured 
uniforms  and  posed  as  discharged  soldiers.  The  American 
Legion  instituted  a  campaign  against  these  men,  urging  the 
public  not  to  give  money  to  them.  The  reemployment  forces 
persuaded  local  authorities  to  refuse  peddling  licenses  to  men 
in  uniform.  Thus  the  evil  was  largely  stamped  out  after  a 
few  months. 

Not  even  the  assurance  of  an  immediate  job  and  the  other 
official  inducements  which  made  the  road  home  the  path  of 
least  resistance  could  always  induce  the  discharged  soldier 
to  go  home  directly,  particularly  if  he  left  the  demobilization 
camp  with  his  pockets  full  of  money.  Around  some  of  the 
demobilization  centers  ranged  bands  of  thieves  and  outlaws 
who,  having  evaded  military  service,  now  during  the  demobili- 
zation wore  the  army  uniform  and  posed  as  discharged  soldiers 
in  order  to  prey  upon  the  ex-service  men.  If  a  soldier  leaving 
the  camp  listened  to  their  fraternal  "Hello,  Buddy!"  and  fell 
in  with  them,  he  usually  later  found  himself  fleeced  to  his  last 
penny.  To  offset  this  evil  the  American  Red  Cross  established 
a  chain  of  soldiers'  banks  at  the  principal  demobilization  cen- 
ters. In  these  banks  the  discharged  men  could  deposit  their 
money,  drawing  it  out  by  check  after  they  reached  their  homes. 
The  deposits  in  the  camp  banks  passed  $4,000,000  in  amount. 

In  one  respect  only  was  the  reemployment  campaign  unsuc- 
cessful. The  War  Department  had  hoped  to  use  the  demobili- 
zation of  troops  as  an  offset  to  some  extent  to  the  steady  drift 
of  population  from  American  farms  to  the  cities.  In  pursuance 
of  this  ambition  the  Government  distributed  among  the  troops 
at  the  demobilization  centers  nearly  1,000,000  copies  of  a 
booklet  entitled  Forzvard  to  the  Farm!  Why  Not?'  Yet,  al- 
though most  country  boys  in  the  Army  were  willing  to  return 
to  the  farms,  the  Government  could  not  induce  the  city  dwell- 
ers to  take  up  country  life.  However,  it  is  noteworthy  that  in 
June,  1919,  when  the  Kansas  wheat  crop  was  in  danger  for 


SOLDIER  WELFARE  in 

want  of  labor  to  harvest  it,  the  reemployment  organization 
was  able  to  send  nearly  50,000  ex-service  men  into  the  Kansas 
wheat  country  during  the  harvest  at  wages  of  $5  to  $7  a  day, 
lodging  and  board  thrown  in. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
WAR  CONTRACTS 

OF  all  the  business  activities  of  the  American  Govern- 
ment in  the  World  War,  none  aroused  in  the  business 
men  of  America  more  interest  or  more  concern  than 
the  Government's  employment  of  its  function  of  making  con- 
tracts with  industry  for  the  production  and  delivery  of  war 
supplies.  There  is  little  danger  of  putting  too  much  emphasis 
upon  the  importance  of  the  war  contract.  After  the  declara- 
tion of  war,  the  Government  rapidly  assumed  unprecedented 
powers  over  business,  until  in  the  heavy  productive  months  of 
1918  it  occupied  a  supreme  position.  The  War  Industries 
Board  had  virtually  commandeered  all  important  raw  mate- 
rials and  was  distributing  them  at  fixed  prices.  The  Govern- 
ment had  become  the  sole  dealer  in  wool ;  it  was  closely  regu- 
lating the  prices  of,  and  determining  priorities  in  the  use  of, 
such  commodities  as  copper  and  steel;  through  the  United 
States  Fuel  Administration  it  was  in  full  control  of  the  pro- 
duction, distribution,  and  use  of  fuels;  and  its  position  was 
equally  monopolistic  toward  all  other  important  basic  mate- 
rials. Of  the  labor,  the  machinery,  and  the  processes  which 
normally  manufactured  these  materials  into  the  commodities 
of  American  commerce,  the  Government  had  become  almost 
the  only  employer;  only  now  it  had  woven  these  facilities,  the 
industrial  facilities  of  the  largest  of  industrial  nations,  into  the 
intricate  texture  of  an  arsenal.  Mechanical  industry  for  pri- 
vate enterprise  had  almost  disappeared.  On  the  day  of  the 
armistice  the  factories  of  the  United  States  were  working  prac- 
tically as  a  unit  in  the  production  of  munitions.  While  the 
Navy,  the  United  States  Shipping  Board,  and  the  military 
missions  of  the  principal  Allies  were  also  prosecuting  extensive 
war  industrial  projects  in  America,  the  War  Department  alone 


WAR  CONTRACTS  113 

had  entered  into  some  30,000  contracts  directly  with  builders 
and  producers,  these  contracts  upon  their  consummation  obli- 
gating the  Government  to  pay  out  a  sum  in  excess  of  $7,500,- 
000,000.  Of  this  production,  less  than  half  (reckoning  it  in 
money  value)  had  been  completed  on  the  day  of  the  armistice. 

It  follows  that  the  instrument  which  commanded  and  set 
in  motion  all  this  effort — the  war  contract — must  have  been 
a  thing  exceedingly  important  to  America.  The  30,000  war 
department  contracts,  as  a  body,  constituted  in  themselves 
the  charter  under  which  the  preponderant  part  of  American 
industry  existed  for  nearly  two  years.  As  wisdom  or  unwisdom 
appeared  written  into  the  provisions  of  the  war  contracts,  so 
fared  well  or  badly  not  only  the  half  of  the  population  directly 
associated  with  industry,  but  the  other  half  as  well,  and  the 
Government,  too.  As  an  example,  it  was  charged  with  some 
degree  of  justice  that  one  great  class  of  war  department  con- 
tracts, the  so-called  cost-plus  contracts,  was  the  chief  factor 
in  the  rapidly  mounting  cost  of  living  during  the  war.  In  other 
ways  also  these  writings,  which  defined  the  terms  of  existence 
for  American  industry,  profoundly  affected  every  person  in 
the  United  States.  We  may  leave  to  lawyers  and  economists 
the  discussion  of  the  academic  legal  questions  involved  in  the 
war  contracts  and  still  find  in  them  plenty  of  interest  common 
to  all. 

When  an  individual  person  goes  out  to  buy  anything,  he 
normally  procures  it  by  paying  the  price  fixed  by  the  seller. 
Business  houses,  too,  commonly  follow  this  custom  in  procur- 
ing their  usual  supplies.  If,  however,  the  individual  person  or 
business  house  is  going  into  some  relatively  large  operation 
in  which  he  will  require  goods  and  services  in  extensive  quan- 
tity, then  it  is  customary  to  ask  for  bids  from  those  in  a  posi- 
tion to  supply  the  needs,  and  to  contract  thereafter  with  the 
concern  which  offers  to  supply  the  goods  and  services  at  the 
best  price.  The  law  requires  the  Government  to  follow  this 
procedure  in  procuring  practically  all  its  supplies.  Each  fed- 
eral department  must  advertise  its  needs  publicly,  giving  com- 
plete specifications,  must  call  publicly  for  bids  to  supply  the 


114  DEMOBILIZATION 

materials  specified,  and  must  allot  the  business  to  the  one 
tendering  the  best  bid;  provided  only  that  the  bidder  is  respon- 
sible and  is  known  to  have  the  ability  to  produce  goods  of  the 
quality  desired.  The  courts  have  held  that  a  contract  written 
under  any  other  conditions  is  void. 

The  law,  however,  permits  certain  exceptions.  The  War 
Department,  for  instance,  is  permitted  by  law  to  increase  the 
size  of  a  contract  already  properly  made.  It  can  deal  directly, 
without  advertising,  with  a  manufacturer  who  is  a  sole  source 
of  supply,  provided  that  previous  advertising  has  elicited  no 
bids.  These  exceptions  are  the  reflection  of  experience  in  gov- 
erning, exceptions  granted  by  Congress  to  the  end  that  the 
Government's  necessary  business  may  not  be  impeded  by  the 
operation  of  the  legal  checks  and  balances. 

Now  there  was  to  the  federal  contracting  rule  one  other 
exception  which  was,  for  our  purposes  here,  the  most  important 
of  all.  The  law  authorized  the  Secretary  of  War  to  enter  into 
contracts  without  the  formality  of  advertising  and  soliciting 
bids,  in  the  event  of  a  national  emergency.  We  had  not  yet 
been  a  week  at  war  with  Germany  when  the  Secretary  of  War 
issued  proclamation  declaring  such  an  emergency  to  exist.  His 
signature  to  this  document  swept  away  the  most  serious  legal 
restrictions  which  circumscribed  the  War  Department's  con- 
tracting powers.  The  hand  of  the  Department  had  been  fur- 
ther strengthened  by  the  National  Defense  Act  (passed  in 
1916),  which  empowered  the  Secretary  of  War,  "in  time  of 
war,  or  when  war  is  imminent,"  to  command  a  manufacturer 
to  produce  supplies  for  the  United  States  at  prices  fixed  by 
the  War  Department  itself;  and  if  the  producer  refused  this 
arrangement,  then  the  Act  empowered  the  Secretary  to  com- 
mandeer and  take  over  the  producer's  business,  paying  the 
producer,  however,  a  fair  and  just  compensation. 

Competition  for  the  Government's  contracts  under  the 
normal  procedure  would  have  been  fatal  to  both  speed  and 
secrecy  in  the  procurement  of  war  supplies,  and  therefore  the 
law  wisely  permitted  the  War  Department  to  abandon  com- 
petition in  the  emergency  of  war.  But,  with  the  safeguard  of 


WAR  CONTRACTS  115 

the  competitive  bid  abandoned,  it  is  reasonable  to  suppose  that 
the  officers  of  the  War  Department,  if  they  were  faithful  serv- 
ants of  the  public,  would  seek  to  protect  the  Government 
against  the  extortioner  by  the  substitution  of  other  devices  not 
open  to  the  objection  either  of  delaying  the  war  manufactur- 
ing program  or  of  betraying  its  nature  and  extent.  And  so  they 
did.  And  although  the  methods  of  applying  the  protection  were 
numerous,  the  essence  of  it  was  that  the  contractor  was  re- 
quired by  the  terms  of  his  contract  to  produce  war  supplies  at 
cost,  plus  a  profit  for  himself,  the  profit  being  reckoned  in 
various  ways.  A  contract  of  this  sort  was  known  as  a  cost-plus 
contract.  Contracts  of  the  normal,  older  sort,  in  which  the 
Government  dealt  with  the  lowest  bidder  or  with  a  producer 
with  whom  the  law  empowered  the  federal  purchasers  to  deal 
directly  without  competition,  were  known  as  fixed-price  or 
lump-sum  contracts. 

The  cost-plus  contract  was  not  entirely  unknown  to  Ameri- 
can business  before  the  war,  but  it  had  been  employed  only 
sparingly.  The  war  brought  the  form  into  great  prominence, 
since  much  of  the  most  important  war  business  was  conducted 
on  the  cost-plus  plan.  It  is  noteworthy  that  the  form  has  per- 
sisted to  some  extent  in  American  private  business,  and  par- 
ticularly in  the  building  industry,  since  the  armistice. 

Although  under  the  circumstances  the  cost-plus  contract  was 
a  necessity  and  its  advantages  were  many,  nevertheless  the 
form  was  endowed  with  an  inherent  weakness  (from  the  Gov- 
ernment's standpoint)  most  difficult  to  overcome.  In  a  lump- 
sum contract  the  profit  of  the  contractor  increased  according 
as  he  was  able  to  keep  down  his  costs.  If  his  costs  ran  too  high, 
he  faced  actual  loss.  In  the  cost-plus  contract  of  the  simplest 
form — cost  of  production,  plus  a  percentage  of  the  cost  as 
profit — it  was  just  the  other  way.  The  higher  a  producer's 
costs,  the  greater  his  profit;  and  though  a  producer  might  not 
deliberately  seek  to  augment  his  costs,  yet  if  he  were  relieved 
of  the  necessity  of  maintaining  a  normal  business  wariness, 
bargaining  for  his  raw  materials,  and  resisting  wage  advances, 
the  best  interests  of  the  Government  might  not  be  served. 


1 1 6  DEMOBILIZATION 

There  Is  no  question  that  the  elementary  form  of  cost-plus  war 
contract  in  the  early  months  of  the  war  added  considerable 
impetus  to  the  procession  of  higher  costs  of  living,  higher 
wages,  and  higher  costs  again  in  the  vicious  circle.  It  was  to 
retard  this  tendency,  to  add  an  inducement  to  the  producer  to 
control  and  keep  down  his  costs,  that  the  Government  evolved 
the  many  modifications  and  refinements  of  the  cost-plus  con- 
tract. 

At  several  points  in  these  narratives  we  have  called  atten- 
tion to  the  train  of  evils  which  followed  the  attempt  of  the 
War  Department  in  1917  to  conduct  its  enterprise  in  the  pro- 
duction of  munitions  with  an  organization  feudal  in  character 
and,  one  might  almost  say,  in  antiquity.  Five  virtually  inde- 
pendent bureaus — the  Ordnance  Department,  the  Quarter- 
master Department,  the  Corps  of  Engineers,  the  Signal  Corps, 
and  the  Medical  Department — and,  later,  after  the  creation 
of  the  Construction  Division,  the  Air  Service,  and  the  Chemical 
Warfare  Service,  eight,  set  forth  to  procure  their  own  war 
supplies  as  competitors,  each  determined  to  attain  its  own 
ends  at  the  expense,  if  necessary,  of  the  others.  This  plan  of 
operation  soon  drew  up  near  the  edge  of  disaster,  as  factories 
and  the  more  accessible  industrial  districts  were  overloaded 
with  war  contracts  by  the  undirected  distribution  of  the  Gov- 
ernment's business,  and  transportation  both  on  rail  and  ocean 
was  nearly  throttled  by  the  congestions  of  freight  at  various 
seaboard  and  inland  terminals. 

Here  again,  in  considering  the  war  contracts,  we  stumble 
once  more  across  the  trail  of  this  faulty  organization.  The  war 
contracts  were  practically  as  diverse  in  their  provisions  and 
types  as  the  Government's  contracting  agencies  were  numer- 
ous; and  here  it  should  be  noted  that  some  of  the  main 
procurement  bureaus  were  in  turn  subdivided  into  smaller 
purchasing  agencies,  each  of  which  drew  its  war  contracts 
according  to  its  own  lights.  About  all  the  early  war  contracts 
had  in  common  were  the  legal  provisions  protecting  the  Gov- 
ernment against  fraud  and  graft.  There  was  no  such  thing  as 
a  standard  contract,  and  no  uniformity  anywhere.  The  Gov- 


WAR  CONTRACTS  117 

ernment  was  being  obligated  in  contracts  to  the  tune  of  bil- 
lions by  contracting  officers  almost  out  of  touch  with  the 
responsible  heads  of  the  administration. 

The  Government  was  soon  forced  to  take  cognizance  of  this 
state  of  affairs.  In  the  spring  of  1917  the  Secretary  of  Com- 
merce convened  the  so-called  Interdepartmental  Conference  to 
consider  the  war  contracts — the  first  attempt  to  bring  har- 
mony into  the  confused  business  situation.  To  the  conference 
came  the  representatives  of  the  various  departments,  boards, 
and  administrations  interested  in  contracts,  and  to  the  sessions 
of  the  conference  also  the  opponents  of  the  cost-plus  contract 
brought  their  objections  to  it.  There  were  those  who  held  it 
almost  solely  responsible  for  the  great  increase  in  costs  of  all 
sorts  during  1917. 

It  was  soon  evident  to  the  conferees,  however,  that  the  cost- 
plus  contract  had  come  to  stay  in  the  war  business,  regardless 
of  its  obvious  dangers  and  disadvantages.  If  an  evil,  it  was 
a  necessary  one.  True,  the  Government  could  still  go  into 
fixed-price  contracts  for  the  procurement  of  many  important 
war  supplies.  These  were  such  supplies  as  food,  clothing,  and 
tools — commodities  essentially  like  those  produced  and  con- 
sumed in  time  of  peace.  The  producers  of  these  commodities 
were  not  perplexed  by  costs ;  their  facilities  and  processes  were 
ready  to  begin  production ;  and  therefore  the  War  Department 
could,  and  did  until  the  end  of  hostilities  (except  when  short- 
ages made  it  necessary  to  deal  with  single  responsible  manu- 
facturers in  order  to  gain  early  deliveries),  procure  such  sup- 
plies on  fixed-price  contracts  let  after  competitive  bidding. 
But  such  supplies,  although  they  bulked  large  in  the  cash 
balance,  contributed  little  to  the  solution  of  the  main  muni- 
tions problem.  It  was  in  the  production  of  artillery,  of  air- 
planes and  airplane  engines,  of  ammunition,  of  explosives, 
even  of  buildings  in  which  to  house  the  war  department  enter- 
prises, that  the  cost-plus  contract  had  become  a  necessity. 

There  was  no  way  of  telling  in  advance  what  would  be  the 
costs  of  producing  these  more  important  supplies.  Many  of 
them  were  of  types  and  designs  entirely  new  to  American 


1 18  DEMOBILIZATION 

manufacturing  experience.  It  was  hard  enough  for  the  gov- 
ernment agents  to  induce  manufacturers  to  undertake  these 
contracts  even  on  a  cost-plus  basis.  Had  the  War  Department 
attempted  to  advertise  the  specifications  of  such  a  mechanism 
as  the  French  hydropneumatic  recuperator,  it  would  never 
have  received  a  bid.  The  only  possible  terms  on  which  any 
sane  manufacturer  would  take  such  a  contract  would  be  the 
payment  of  his  costs,  plus  a  profit. 

Many  of  the  contracts  for  the  more  difficult  sorts  of  supplies 
were  bound  to  continue  over  an  extended  period  before  all  the 
deliveries  could  be  made.  It  was  often  impossible  for  such 
contractors  to  make  commitments  in  advance  for  all  their  raw 
materials.  Therefore  they  faced  a  rising  market  and  prices 
which  they  could  not  predetermine.  They  also  faced  almost 
certain  increases  in  the  wages  paid  to  their  employees ;  yet  here 
again  they  could  not  anticipate  what  these  increases  would  be. 
The  costs  of  a  maker  of  optical  instruments  for  the  Army  de- 
pended partially  upon  what  he  should  have  to  pay  for  optical 
glass,  but  the  glass  was  to  come  from  a  new  war  industry  which 
had  not  yet  begun  production  and  therefore  could  not  estimate 
what  it  would  charge  for  glass.  With  its  designs  for  war  im- 
plements the  War  Department  did  the  best  it  could,  founding 
its  specifications  upon  the  latest  and  best  information  at  its 
command.  Yet  so  rapid  was  the  evolution  of  war  materials 
resulting  from  their  intensive  use  that  sometimes  the  Depart- 
ment found  a  design  obsolete  before  its  production  was  fairly 
begun.  Its  designers  therefore  made  changes  in  the  specifica- 
tions at  the  factory,  and  these  changes  involved  heavy  manu- 
facturing costs.  Every  contractor  knew  that  his  work  was  to  be 
subject  to  such  changes  in  the  specifications;  yet  no  one  could 
foretell  whether  changes  would  be  made  or  what  they  would 
cost. 

These  purely  manufacturing  considerations  were  enough  in 
themselves  to  explain  the  prevalence  of  the  cost-plus  contracts. 
Another  element  was  the  time  required  to  prepare  specifica- 
tions and  advertise  for  bids — time  not  to  be  spared  in  war. 
But  there  was  still  another  reason  to  account  for  the  cost- 


WAR  CONTRACTS  119 

plus  contract,  a  reason  in  war  finance,  even  more  cogent.  The 
successful  prosecution  of  the  war  meant  that  practically  the 
entire  industrial  equipment  of  the  United  States  would  have 
to  be  devoted  to  the  production  of  war  supplies.  Before  the 
war  only  large  concerns  with  great  financial  resources  were  able 
to  put  through  great  government  projects  in  which  the  delivery 
dates  were  far  removed  from  the  dates  of  starting  the  work.  A 
war  contract  often  involved  a  tremendous  preliminary  expen- 
diture of  money  in  factory  expansion  and  in  commitments  for 
raw  materials.  The  Government's  practice  was  to  pay  for  sup- 
plies only  upon  their  delivery.  Under  such  conditions  the  small 
manufacturer  could  not  work  for  the  Government.  In  normal 
times,  perhaps,  the  possession  of  a  government  contract  might 
have  enabled  him  to  finance  his  operation  through  the  banks 
in  the  usual  way,  but  with  every  manufacturer  needing  special 
financing,  the  effect  upon  the  banks  was  to  make  them  less 
liberal  in  their  commercial  loans.  The  banks  had  their  own 
solvency  to  look  out  for  first. 

The  cost-plus  contract  proved  to  be  one  of  the  solutions  of 
this  problem.  Most  of  the  cost-plus  contracts  provided  that  the 
War  Department  could  pay  the  manufacturing  costs  as  they 
accrued,  in  installments.  Thus,  by  securing  partial  advance 
payments  from  the  Government,  the  small  producers,  and  the 
large,  too,  were  able  to  finance  their  projects  and  even  to  take 
advantage  of  the  cash  discounts  in  their  purchases  of  raw  mate- 
rials. Naturally,  the  War  Department  was  careful  to  make 
such  arrangements  only  with  contractors  of  recognized  prob- 
ity, men  who  were  deserving  of  confidence,  but  who  often 
lacked  working  capital  to  enable  them  to  become  successful 
producers  of  war  supplies.* 

The  Interdepartmental  Conference,  far  from  disapproving 
or  attempting  to  abolish  the  cost-plus  contract,  recognized  its 

*  The  financing  of  war  factories,  and  particularly  of  those  which  had  to 
make  large  and  expensive  plant  additions  before  manufacturing  could  proceed, 
was  effectively  aided  by  the  War  Credits  Board  of  the  War  Department.  In 
the  autumn  of  1917  Congress  authorized  the  War  Department  to  advance  to 
contractors  amounts  up  to  30  per  cent  of  the  total  contract  obligations.  The 
War  Credits  Board  administered  this  work.  In  all,  it  lent  to  war  department 


1 20  DEMOBILIZATION 

necessity,  but  registered  a  preference  for  forms  of  it  which  best 
protected  the  interests  of  the  people  and  of  the  Government. 
The  elemental  cost-plus  contract  obligated  the  Government  to 
pay  manufacturing  costs,  plus  an  agreed-upon  percentage  of 
the  costs  as  profit.  Costs  included  not  only  the  charges  for 
labor  and  materials,  but  also  certain  overhead  and  deprecia- 
tion charges.  This  contract  form  was  vicious  in  principle,  and 
the  Conference  did  not  approve  it.  Meanwhile  various  con- 
tracting officers  of  the  Government  had  been  improving  the 
cost-plus  contract  with  provisions  which  either  removed  the 
tendency  for  the  contractor  to  increase  his  costs  or  added 
inducements  to  him  to  keep  his  costs  down.  One  of  these 
improvements  was  a  cost-plus  form  providing  for  a  fixed  profit 
to  the  contractor,  regardless  of  what  his  costs  might  be.  This 
form  removed  the  incentive  to  increase  costs.  A  still  further 
refinement  made  it  of  material  advantage  to  a  contractor  to 
keep  down  his  costs  and  penalized  the  man  who  was  careless 
about  costs.  In  this  form  the  Government  agreed  to  pay  all 
costs  and  a  fixed  profit,  but  the  contract  also  fixed  in  advance 
an  estimated  unit  price  for  the  product,  this  price  being  known 
as  "bogey,"  a  term  borrowed  from  the  ancient  and  honorable 
game  of  golf.  If  the  contractor  succeeded  in  holding  his  costs, 
plus  his  fixed  profit,  under  the  unit  bogey  price,  he  was  paid  a 
share  of  the  saving.  If,  however,  his  costs  and  profits  ran  above 
bogey,  then  he  was  penalized  a  percentage  of  the  excess,  the 
penalty  being  subtracted  from  his  fixed  profit  when  the  War 
Department  came  to  pay  for  the  supplies.  This  form  not  only 
put  a  premium  upon  plant  efficiency,  but  it  stimulated  the 
speed  of  production ;  for  the  briefer  the  factory  processes,  the 
smaller  the  costs,  as  a  rule,  and  the  sooner  the  contractor  would 
get  his  money.  The  Interdepartmental  Conference  approved 
both  these  forms. 

This  was  not  yet  the  desideratum  of  standardization  in  con- 
tracts, but  it  was  a  step  in  that  direction  and  perhaps  as  much 

contractors  about  $250,0CX),000.  On  June  i,  1921,  it  had  recouped  all  but  $14,- 
500,000  of  these  loans.  Its  total  losses  were  not  expected  to  run  over  $150,000, 
while  the  profits  (interest,  of  which  $8,000,000  had  been  collected)  were  esti- 
mated at  $12,000,000. 


WAR  CONTRACTS  121 

as  could  be  done  in  an  organization  as  ill-articulated  as  that  of 
the  War  Department  then  was.  The  Interdepartmental  Con- 
ference possessed  only  advisory  powers,  but  it  was  able  to 
establish  a  policy  for  the  Government  in  its  contracting  func- 
tion. By  pointing  to  the  more  desirable  forms  of  contracts,  its 
report  was  at  least  a  moral  force  in  securing  greater  uniform- 
ity in  war  contracts.  It  must  be  remembered,  too,  that  most  of 
the  contracting  officers  were  men  of  considerable  business 
experience  and  ability.  Many  of  the  leading  business  men  of 
the  country  were  serving  the  United  States  either  in  uniform 
or  as  officers  of  such  agencies  as  the  Council  of  National  De- 
fense and  the  War  Industries  Board,  and  the  procurement 
bureaus  had  the  benefit  of  their  study  and  advice  in  the  making 
of  contracts. 

Under  such  conditions  a  great  volume  of  war  department 
business  was  placed  in  the  latter  part  of  1917  and  during  the 
early  months  of  1918.  Then  the  conditions  of  war  industry 
finally  forced  a  reorganization  of  the  War  Department,  bring- 
ing all  of  its  supply  activities  (with  one  or  two  important 
exceptions)  under  the  single  direction  of  the  Division  of  Pur- 
chase, Storage,  and  Traffic,  of  the  General  Staff.  The  Division 
of  P.,  S.,  and  T.,  as  it  was  called,  was  created  early  in  1918. 
One  of  the  first  acts  of  its  director  was  to  appoint  a  committee 
to  study  the  various  forms  of  war  department  contracts  in  use 
and  to  recommend  standard  forms  which  should  keep  errors 
at  a  minimum  and  make  the  War  Department  certain  at  all 
times  as  to  its  rights  under  its  contracts. 

Simultaneously  the  new  Division  was  assuming  a  central- 
ized control  of  war  department  contracts.  Early  in  June  the 
Secretary  of  War  appointed  a  Surveyor  of  Contracts,  who  in 
turn  appointed  a  board  of  contract  review  within  each  pro- 
curement bureau.  A  bureau  board  was  to  pass  upon  all  pro- 
posed contracts  drawn  by  contracting  officers,  except  the  few 
contracts  which  involved  the  Government  for  trivial  amounts 
of  money.  This  system,  with  the  Surveyor  of  Contracts  dictat- 
ing policies  and  passing  them  on  down  through  the  bureau 
boards,  was  effective  control  of  the  contracting  function  under 


1 22  DEMOBILIZATION 

a  single  direction;  but  in  late  July  the  Secretary  of  War  still 
further  strengthened  the  scheme  by  appointing  the  Superior 
Board  of  Contract  Review.  The  Director  of  Purchases  and 
Supplies  and  the  Surveyor  of  Contracts  were  the  general  mem- 
bers of  this  Board,  and  each  procurement  bureau  sent  to  it  a 
member,  who  was  either  the  chief  procurement  officer  of  the 
bureau  or  a  member  of  the  bureau's  board  of  contract  review. 
This  Superior  Board  of  Contract  Review  became  the  great 
policy-forming  agency  of  the  War  Department  in  respect  of 
its  contracting  activities. 

Note,  however,  that  not  yet  had  there  been  any  standardi- 
zation of  contracts.  In  early  August  the  committee  appointed 
by  the  Director  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic  to  study  war 
contracts  and  recommend  standards,  made  its  report.  The 
Superior  Board  of  Contract  Review  received  this  report,  and 
early  in  September  promulgated,  on  the  basis  of  the  report,  a 
series  of  twenty-four  standard  contract  provisions,  nineteen  of 
them  to  be  included  in  all  war  department  fixed-price  and  cost- 
plus  contracts,  and  five  particular  provisions  pertaining  either 
to  cost-plus  or  fixed-price  contracts,  but  not  to  both.  Most 
of  the  standard  provisions,  except  perhaps  in  their  phraseology, 
were  not  new,  but  had  been  used  in  substance  variously  by  the 
contracting  officers.  The  importance  of  standardization  was 
that  it  required  the  use  of  all  of  them  in  the  war  contracts  and 
also  dictated  the  phraseology.  One  or  two  of  the  standard 
clauses,  particularly  those  which  anticipated  the  end  of  the 
war  and  the  termination  of  the  war  industry,  were  new  and 
most  important. 

The  first  six  provisions  dealt  with  the  Government's  obliga- 
tions to  furnish  raw  materials  and  component  parts  to  the 
manufacturer,  with  the  packing  and  marking  of  supplies,  with 
the  changing  of  specifications  and  the  Government's  assump- 
tion of  increased  costs  or  savings  wrought  thereby,  with 
inspection,  with  the  storage  of  finished  products  at  plants,  and 
with  extensions  of  the  time  of  the  contract  under  certain 
conditions. 

The  seventh  provision  anticipated  the  end  of  the  war  by 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

SENDING  OUT  THE  STARS  AND  STRIPES 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

GRADUATE  A.  E.  F.  STUDENTS  AT  EDINBURGH 
UNIVERSITY 


Photo  by  Howard  E.  Coffin 

REVIEW  OF  "PERSHING'S  OWN  REGIMENT  "  AT  COBLENZ 


Photo   by  Signal   Corps 

GAMES  IN  LE  MANS  EMBARKATION  AREA 


WAR  CONTRACTS  123 

providing  for  the  cancellation  of  contracts  under  certain  cir- 
cumstances, one  of  which  was  if  the  public  interest  required  it. 
This  was  a  new  thing  in  war  contracts.  The  provision  set  forth 
the  reimbursements  which  the  contractor  should  receive  in  the 
event  of  cancellation. 

The  eighth  forbade  contractors  receiving  advance  payments 
from  the  Government  to  mortgage  or  otherwise  pledge  articles 
partially  completed.  Thus,  if  the  contract  were  canceled,  the 
Government  could  take  over  the  unfinished  work  without 
involving  itself  in  a  mesh  of  legal  complications.  The  next 
provision  dealt  with  protection  of  war  plants.  The  next  was 
the  statutory  one  forbidding  the  transfer  of  contracts. 

The  eleventh  provision  dealt  with  subcontractors,  normally 
not  of  any  interest  to  the  Government,  but  in  war  of  vital 
interest,  since  the  failure  of  a  subcontractor  might  greatly 
delay  an  entire  project,  and  since  also  a  cost-plus  contract 
offered  an  opportunity  to  a  prime  contractor  to  conspire  with 
a  subcontractor  to  increase  costs.  The  provision  gave  the  Gov- 
ernment full  control  over  the  subcontracting  and  extended  to 
the  subcontractors  the  Government's  rights  of  cancellation. 

The  twelfth  was  the  statutory  one  forbidding  any  member 
of  Congress  from  sharing  in  the  benefits  of  a  contract,  except 
that  a  congressman  was  permitted  to  own  stock  in  a  corpora- 
tion accepting  war  contracts. 

The  next  provision  wiped  out  the  horde  of  fly-by-night  com- 
mission brokers  who  had  flocked  to  Washington  to  grow  rich 
on  commissions  paid  by  gullible  producers  who  accepted  the 
theory  that  it  took  pull  and  influence  to  secure  a  war  contract. 
Since  these  commissions  went  into  the  manufacturer's  costs 
and  therefore  were  paid  eventually  by  the  Government,  the 
Attorney  General  had  issued  a  ruling  forbidding  the  govern- 
ment departments  to  pay  manufacturing  costs  that  included 
brokers'  commissions.  Established  selling  agencies,  however, 
were  exempted  from  this  rule.  The  thirteenth  standard  contract 
provision  wrote  this  prohibition  into  the  contracts  themselves. 

The  next  provision  dealt  with  indemnifications  for  the  inva- 
sion of  patent  rights.  The  fifteenth  provided  for  the  settlement 


1 24  DEMOBILIZATION 

of  disputes  and  claims  arising  out  of  questions  of  performance 
or  nonperformance  under  contracts.  Later  the  Board  of  Con- 
tract Adjustment  was  organized  to  fulfill  this  function.  The 
next  three  provisions  dealt  with  hours  of  labor,  the  settlement 
of  wage  disputes,  and  the  conditions  of  labor  at  war  plants. 
Then  came  a  provision  requiring  the  producer  to  make  periodic 
reports  of  the  progress  of  his  work,  one  defining  what  costs 
would  be  allowed  in  a  cost-plus  contract,  one  allowing  the 
contractor  to  appeal  to  the  Board  of  Contract  Adjustment  in 
the  event  that  a  contracting  oflScer  of  the  Department  dis- 
allowed costs  in  excess  of  $5,000,  one  providing  for  uniformity 
in  contractors'  cost  accounting,  one  forbidding  the  payment  of 
wages  above  current  local  rates,  and  a  final  provision  vesting 
in  the  United  States  the  title  to  all  materials  in  course  of 
manufacture  under  a  cost-plus  contract. 

Such  were  the  standard  contract  provisions,  protective  and 
fair  to  the  Government  and  the  producers  alike.  They  were 
not  adopted  until  the  end  of  the  summer  of  1918,  and  there- 
fore no  important  amount  of  government  business  was  placed 
on  their  identical  terms.  As  stated,  however,  most  of  their 
requirements  in  substance  had  been  written  into  the  war  de- 
partment contracts  previously  drawn. 

The  cost-plus  contract  under  which  the  immense  building 
construction  program  of  the  War  Department  was  carried 
through  was  of  a  peculiar  form,  not  used  elsewhere.  It  was 
known  as  the  cost-plus- with-sliding-scale-and-fiixed-maximum- 
fee  contract.  The  distinguishing  feature  of  it  was  that  each 
contractor  was  paid  a  percentage  of  the  cost  as  profit  up  to  the 
extent  of  a  fixed  maximum  profit,  and  he  could  not  be  paid 
more  than  this  profit  whatever  the  cost  of  the  job.  The  profit 
percentage  diminished  on  a  sliding  scale  as  the  cost  mounted. 
In  its  latest  form  this  contract  paid  a  profit  of  7  per  cent  to 
contractors  on  jobs  costing  less  than  $100,000,  and  the  profit 
declined  gradually  in  percentage  until  it  reached  the  low  mark 
of  25^  per  cent  paid  as  profit  for  work  costing  more  than 
$9,650,000.  No  building  contractor,  however,  could  be  paid 
more  than  $250,000  profit  on  a  job,  whatever  its  cost;  and 


WAR  CONTRACTS  125 

out  of  his  "profit"  he  still  had  to  pay  his  overhead  operating 
expenses. 

In  its  building  program  the  War  Department  became  one 
of  the  largest  employers  of  labor  in  the  country,  and  its  build- 
ing contract  was  roundly  attacked  as  a  chief  element  in  the 
swift  rise  in  wages.  To  meet  this  attack  the  Department  con- 
vened a  board  of  construction  engineers  and  other  experts  to 
study  the  contract.  Instead  of  condemning  the  form  of  con- 
tract, the  report  of  this  board  endorsed  it  in  unqualified  terms 
and  declared  that,  if  anything,  the  contract  tended  to  check 
extravagances  in  the  work. 

While  the  tendency  was  all  toward  the  cost-plus-fixed-profit 
form  of  contract,  when  it  came  to  the  production  of  materials 
entirely  new  and  strange  to  our  industry  the  War  Department 
could  not  escape  the  cost-plus-percentage  form.  The  Govern- 
ment's powder-bag-loading  plants  were  operating  on  the  basis 
of  the  payment  of  operating  costs,  plus  14  per  cent.  Several  of 
the  shell-loading  plants  worked  under  contracts  providing  for 
the  payment  of  costs,  plus  10  per  cent.  Silk  cartridge  cloth  was 
manufactured  at  cost,  plus  10  per  cent  as  profit.  This  profit, 
as  the  skill  of  the  cloth  weavers  increased,  was  gradually 
stepped  down  to  3  per  cent.  The  Modified  Enfield  rifles  were 
made  at  cost,  plus  10  per  cent.  When  the  War  Department 
commandeered  plants,  it  engaged  operating  companies  to  run 
them  on  a  basis  of  costs  paid,  plus  a  fixed  monthly  remunera- 
tion. Certain  patriotic  contractors  built  large  munitions  plants 
for  the  Government  at  cost,  plus  the  statutory  $1  as  profit. 

Then  there  was  the  combination  contract,  adopted  for  work 
new  to  our  industrial  experience — a  cost-plus  form  graduating 
into  a  fixed-profit  form  as  the  actual  work  developed  what  the 
costs  would  be.  The  Browning  machine  guns  were  produced 
under  contracts  of  this  sort. 

Contracts  for  the  production  of  aircraft  were  not  brought 
under  the  centralized  administration  of  war  department  con- 
tracts. The  aircraft  contracts  provided  for  the  payment  of 
costs  by  the  Government,  plus  fixed  profits,  with  bonuses  for 
the  producers  if  they  kept  under  the  estimated  costs. 


CHAPTER  IX 
THE  SETTLEMENT  OF  THE  WAR  CONTRACTS 

IN  the  preceding  chapter  we  have  been  discussing  chiefly  the 
written,  formal  contract,  the  tangible,  visible  document, 
duly  signed  and  witnessed,  which  could  be  submitted  to 
any  court  as  prima-facie  evidence  of  the  obligations  of  both 
the  producer  and  the  Government.  If,  however,  the  impres- 
sion has  been  given  that  all  the  war  business  was  conducted 
under  the  authority  of  such  instruments,  let  it  now  be  dis- 
pelled ;  because  thousands  of  manufacturers  did  war  work  for 
the  Government,  and  the  Government  itself  became  involved 
for  hundreds  of  millions  of  dollars,  under  another  set  of  ar- 
rangements, which  became  known,  after  the  armistice,  as  the 
informal,  or  "Bevo,"  contracts.  These  agreements,  while  em- 
bodying the  same  terms  as  those  of  the  formal  contracts,  were 
drawn  with  no  such  attention  to  the  niceties  of  federal  pro- 
cedure, without  which  the  law  says  that  a  government  con- 
tract is  not  enforcible.  The  informal  contracts  were  a  product 
of  the  hurry  and  rush  to  get  things  done.  There  were  several 
sorts  of  them,  some  being  formal  in  type  but  defective  in 
detail,  others  existing  in  written  records,  such  as  correspond- 
ence, but  not  in  formal  contracts,  and  still  others  being  merely 
oral  agreements  between  the  producers  and  the  agents  of  the 
Government  as  to  what  work  had  to  be  done. 

The  law,  in  theory,  assumes  that  the  Secretary  of  War  him- 
self makes  and  signs  contracts  for  the  production  of  army 
supplies.  He  is  permitted  by  law,  however,  to  delegate  his 
contracting  function  to  accredited  deputies,  who  are  called 
contracting  officers.  In  normal  times  these  contracting  officers 
are  able  to  make  all  the  necessary  contracts;  but  during  the 
war,  with  all  industry  aligning  itself  in  the  munitions  organi- 


SETTLEMENT  OF  WAR  CONTRACTS        127 

zation,  it  became  physically  impossible  for  the  regular  con- 
tracting officers  to  handle  all  the  business,  and  they  in  turn 
appointed  deputies  or  proxies,  and  conferred  on  them  (quite 
illegally,  as  it  afterwards  appeared)  the  right  to  sign  con- 
tracts. Then,  in  the  urgency  of  the  occasion,  the  procurement 
officers,  who  were  frequently  business  men  commissioned  in 
the  military  service,  adopted  the  common  business  expedient 
of  allowing  correspondence  to  stand  as  evidence  of  contractual 
engagements,  expecting  to  follow  up  this  correspondence  with 
formal  contracts  when  the  ponderous  executive  machinery  of 
the  Department  could  get  around  to  it.  Sometimes  the  pro- 
ducer did  not  even  have  the  protection  of  correspondence,  but, 
after  coming  to  an  oral  understanding  with  the  contracting 
officer  as  to  what  was  to  be  done  and  on  what  terms,  hurried 
back  to  his  factory  to  spend,  it  might  be,  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands of  dollars  in  preparation  for  some  large  manufacturing 
effort,  without  a  scrap  of  writing  to  secure  him  in  these  invest- 
ments. Finally,  there  was  an  extensive  class  of  contracts  which 
lacked  correct  form.  New  officers,  unfamiliar  with  the  restric- 
tions which  hedge  about  the  governmental  administrative  acts, 
restrictions  which  the  public  calls  red  tape,  took  the  short  cut 
of  making  out  direct  purchase  orders,  which  stipulated  qual- 
ity, quantity,  price,  method  of  payment,  time  of  delivery,  and 
so  on ;  and  the  producers  accepted  such  orders  in  good  faith  as 
binding  agreements. 

All  went  well  with  this  informal  procedure  until  the  armi- 
stice brought  the  necessity  of  terminating  the  war  business. 
The  question  was.  How  might  the  oral  and  other  informal 
contracts  be  settled"?  And  then  the  Comptroller  of  the  Treas- 
ury rendered  the  absolutely  stunning  decision  that  all  these 
informal  arrangements,  including  the  formal  contracts  which 
had  been  signed  by  proxies  of  the  constituted  contracting  offi- 
cers, were  illegal  and  without  standing  before  the  Treasury, 
and  that  not  a  penny  of  government  money  could  be  paid  out 
in  settlement  of  the  obligations  of  the  Government  under  the 
terms  of  these  agreements,  except  that  the  Government  could 
pay  for  goods  actually  delivered.  At  that  time  the  outstanding 


128  DEMOBILIZATION 

contracts  and  agreements  of  all  sorts  involved  the  Government 
in  the  sum  of  approximately  $7,500,000,000.  The  informal 
contracts,  thus  declared  void,  accounted  for  $1,500,000,000 
of  this  sum.  The  Government,  if  it  chose,  could  refuse  to  reim- 
burse a  dollar  of  hundreds  of  millions  expended  freely  by 
patriotic  manufacturers,  careless  of  their  own  interests  in  their 
eagerness  to  give  their  utmost  service  to  the  prosecution  of  the 
war. 

Of  course,  repudiation  of  these  agreements  was  unthinkable, 
if  only  for  the  reason  that  such  action  would  have  brought  on 
an  unprecedented  business  panic  and  sent  many  concerns  crash- 
ing down  into  bankruptcy.  Yet  the  only  remedy  was  legislation 
to  permit  the  Government  to  settle  up  its  obligations  under 
these  contracts  just  as  if  they  had  been  properly  drawn  in  the 
first  place.  Such  legislation,  known  as  the  Dent  Act,  was  even- 
tually passed  by  Congress,  the  law  being  approved  by  the 
President  on  March  2,  1919.  In  the  interim  between  the  armi- 
stice and  that  date,  the  holders  of  informal  and  irregular  con- 
tracts were  subjected  to  an  unavoidable  injustice,  the  nature 
of  which  will  be  plain  when  we  have  somewhat  examined  the 
War  Department's  method  of  terminating  its  war  industry. 

The  modem  contract  is  the  foundation  stone  of  industry  and 
commerce.  If  the  integrity  of  that  foundation  be  impaired,  we 
come  into  a  condition  of  anarchy  of  which  Anglo-Saxon  civili- 
zation knows  nothing.  The  man  who  breaches  a  contract  can 
be  held  in  court  to  indemnify  the  other  party  to  it,  and  the 
Government  itself  cannot  escape  such  liability.  On  the  first 
day  of  the  armistice  there  were  30,000  outstanding  war  de- 
partment contracts.  Three  thousand  of  these,  involving  a 
government  expenditure  of  over  $1,500,000,000,  either  were 
so  near  completion  or  called  for  the  production  of  materials 
so  necessary  to  the  maintenance  of  the  demobilizing  Army  or 
for  the  future  preparedness  of  the  United  States  that  they  were 
allowed  to  go  through  undisturbed.  The  other  27,000  con- 
tracts bore  a  face  value  of  $6,000,000,000.  Under  many  of 
them  there  had  been  extensive  deliveries  of  finished  supplies 
to  the  Government,  these  deliveries  (including  the  deliveries 


SETTLEMENT  OF  WAR  CONTRACTS        129 

made  while  the  industries  were  tapering  off  their  production 
and  adjusting  themselves  to  peace  conditions)  amounting  to 
approximately  $2,000,000,000  in  value.  Thus  there  was  left 
to  the  War  Department  a  contractual  obligation  amounting  to 
$4,000,000,000,  which  huge  sum  would  go  to  pay  for  a  great 
mass  of  materials  for  which  the  Government  could  have  no 
possible  use.  It  was  highly  desirable  to  terminate  the  unful- 
filled portions  of  these  contracts ;  yet  few  of  the  contracts  con- 
tained termination  clauses.  It  will  be  remembered  that  the 
standard  termination  clause  did  not  appear  as  a  common  fea- 
ture of  the  war  contracts  until  the  final  six  weeks  of  hostilities. 
Thus  the  majority  of  the  27,000  contractors  possessed  the 
plain  legal  right  to  go  through  with  the  performance  of  their 
contracts,  even  though  the  war  had  ended,  and  thereafter  to 
hold  the  Government  to  the  full  payment  of  the  face  value  of 
the  contracts.  The  sum  of  such  determination,  had  it  been 
unanimous,  would  have  cost  the  United  States  $4,000,000,- 
000  with  nothing  to  show  for  it  except  a  great  collection  of 
useless  munitions  which  could  be  sold  to  the  junk  dealers. 

Upon  the  administration  of  the  War  Department  rested  the 
responsibility  to  save  for  the  people  as  much  of  this  sum  as 
could  be  saved.  Not  all  of  it  could  be  saved.  Millions  had 
been  spent  by  the  contractors  for  machinery  and  other  equip- 
ment, for  materials,  and  to  pay  manufacturing  costs  during  the 
early  stages  of  production.  These  millions  the  Government  was 
bound  to  reimburse  in  any  event,  together  with  a  reasonable 
profit  upon  work  already  done.  The  closer  the  administration 
could  come  to  paying  these  legitimate  costs  and  nothing  else, 
the  more  successful  would  be  its  conduct  of  the  industrial 
demobilization.  The  question  was,  what  procedure  to  adopt. 

To  be  sure,  the  departmental  heads  might  have  adopted  the 
policy  of  canceling  the  contracts  outright;  but  such  a  course 
would  have  meant  ruin  for  many  manufacturers,  it  would  have 
thrown  into  the  courts  a  mass  of  litigation  that  would  have 
congested  them  for  the  next  two  generations,  and  it  would 
have  shattered  the  faith  of  business  in  the  Government  and 
rendered  difficult  all  governmental  contracting  in  the  future. 


130  DEMOBILIZATION 

Instead  of  that,  the  war  department  heads  adopted  the  shrewd 
measure  of  requesting  the  producers  to  suspend  work  on  their 
contracts.  They  made  termination  a  voluntary  act  on  the  part 
of  the  contractor.  It  is  obvious  that  it  was  fully  as  much  to  the 
interest  of  the  producers  as  to  that  of  the  Government  to 
liquidate  the  war  business  amicably  and,  it  may  be  said,  inex- 
pensively, since  these  very  men  would  be  the  ones  called  upon 
to  contribute  most  heavily  in  taxes  to  the  payment  of  the  war 
debt.  Nevertheless,  it  was  greatly  to  the  credit  of  American 
business  men  that  their  response  to  the  general  request  to  ter- 
minate war  contracts  was  nearly  unanimous.  There  was  scarcely 
one  who  stood  on  his  full  legal  rights.  The  business  of  indus- 
trial demobilization  was  largely  that  of  negotiating  with  the 
individual  producers  as  to  the  terms  under  which  they  would 
consent  to  terminate  their  contracts.  When  the  terms  were 
adopted,  they  were  written  into  the  original  contracts  as  sup- 
plemental agreements  and  thus  given  legal  force.  The  decision 
which  resulted  in  this  procedure  was  one  of  the  great  adminis- 
trative acts  of  the  War  Government.  It  saved  billions  of  dol- 
lars to  the  Government  and  it  sent  the  war  producers  away 
fairly  well  content  with  the  treatment  they  had  received. 

The  preliminary  steps  in  industrial  demobilization  were 
taken  before  the  armistice.  For  one  thing,  in  those  final  days 
when  it  was  apparent  that  the  end  was  close  at  hand,  the  War 
Department  adopted  the  policy  of  terminating  the  war  con- 
tracts by  agreement.  For  that  purpose,  the  war  department 
administration  added  to  the  standard  contract  provisions  al- 
ready adopted  standard  forms  of  supplemental  agreements,  to 
the  end  that  the  liquidation  of  war  industry  might  be  carried 
out  uniformly.  On  November  9  all  production  bureaus  of  the 
Department  were  notified  to  be  ready  to  enforce  the  termina- 
tion clauses  of  contracts  when  the  fighting  ended.  This  order, 
of  course,  applied  only  to  those  contracts  containing  termina- 
tion clauses;  but  at  the  same  time  provision  was  made  for  the 
suspension  of  war  work  when  the  public  interest  required  it. 
This  suspension  was  to  be  preliminary  to  the  adoption  of  ar- 
rangements whereby  war  industry  could  be  gradually  stopped 


SETTLEMENT  OF  WAR  CONTRACTS        131 

down  and  readjusted  by  easy  stages.  On  this  date,  too,  the 
Department  adopted  a  policy  from  which  it  never  afterwards 
deviated:  not  to  pay  to  a  producer  any  profits  on  prospective 
production  under  his  contract,  but  to  allow  a  profit  as  high  as 
10  per  cent  of  the  cost  on  work  that  had  actually  been  done 
but  from  which  no  actual  production  might  have  resulted. 
Thus  from  the  very  first  the  Government  showed  a  spirit  of 
conciliation  that  promised  well  for  the  producers  of  war 
supplies. 

On  the  morning  of  November  11,  after  the  receipt  of  the 
official  news  of  the  armistice,  the  Secretary  of  War,  the  Secre- 
tary of  the  Navy,  and  the  Director  of  the  United  States 
Shipping  Board  announced  after  a  conference  that  all  Sunday 
work  and  overtime  work  on  government  contracts  would  cease 
at  once,  and  that  war  industry  would  be  tapered  off  by  the 
various  procurement  agencies  in  consultation  with  the  Depart- 
ment of  Labor  and  the  War  Industries  Board.  These  two  or- 
ganizations, the  one  in  contact  with  employers  and  the  other 
with  labor,  were  in  a  position  to  guard  the  interests  both  of 
labor  and  of  industry.  Meanwhile  the  procurement  bureaus 
of  the  War  Department,  following  the  recent  instructions, 
had  sent  out  generally  requests  to  suspend  the  manufacture  of 
munitions.  These  orders  were  soon  modified  to  allow  produc- 
tion to  continue  at  most  of  the  war  plants,  but  the  brief 
interim  of  idleness  gave  the  procurement  officers  time  to  survey 
the  situation  and  also  served  as  a  notice  to  the  manufacturers 
that  the  war  was  over  and  that  they  were  to  incur  no  further 
obligations  in  pursuance  of  their  contracts. 

Simultaneously  with  issuing  the  suspension  requests,  the 
procurement  bureaus  in  Washington  began  making  out  what 
were  known  as  termination  schedules.  These  were  detailed 
statements  of  proposed  reductions  in  war  work  compiled  by 
individual  contracts,  by  manufacturing  projects,  by  entire 
commodities  that  were  being  consumed  by  the  Army,  and  by 
entire  production  programs.  These  schedules  were  first  sent  for 
approval  to  the  Director  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic, 
who  also  secured  the  approval  of  the  War  Industries  Board 


132  DEMOBILIZATION 

and  the  Department  of  Labor.  The  approved  schedules  were 
then  sent  back  to  the  bureaus  for  action,  except  that  the 
bureaus  were  instructed  to  terminate  the  production  gradually 
so  as  not  to  disturb  industry  in  any  particular  localities.  The 
terminations,  of  course,  were  made  by  agreement  with  the  pro- 
ducers, the  agreements  embodying  the  terms  under  which  the 
manufacturing  ceased. 

So  expeditiously  was  this  work  started  that  the  first  termi- 
nation schedules  reached  the  Director  of  Purchase,  Storage, 
and  Traffic  on  November  12,  and  the  schedules  poured  in  upon 
him  every  day  thereafter.  Within  a  few  days  the  prepared 
schedules  involved  the  termination  of  a  billion  dollars'  worth 
of  work.  Each  schedule  was  the  product  of  a  comprehensive 
study  of  the  industries  affected,  made  by  the  production 
bureaus,  which  were  in  intimate  touch  with  those  industries. 
On  December  5  the  terminations  and  reductions  reached  a 
total  of  $2,500,000,000.  A  large  part  of  the  war  industry  had 
been  reduced  or  terminated  without  serious  detriment  to  the 
condition  of  business  and  employment.  Consequently,  it  was 
decided  that  no  such  precautions  as  were  being  taken  were 
longer  necessary,  and  a  change  in  the  liquidation  system  went 
into  effect.  Thereafter  the  stoppage  of  war  industry  was  placed 
entirely  in  the  hands  of  the  district  production  officers  of  the 
War  Department.  These  men  were  to  consult  with  the  local 
officers  of  the  Department  of  Labor  as  to  the  effect  of  termi- 
nations upon  employment,  and  were  also  to  make  frequent 
regular  reports  to  the  Director  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and 
Traffic.  For  the  rest,  they  were  free  to  act  according  to  their 
own  best  judgment. 

The  various  supply  bureaus  were  well  organized  to  con- 
duct the  demobilization  in  this  way.  Before  1917  the  bureaus 
had  administered  the  production  of  supplies  directly  from 
their  headquarters  in  Washington.  After  the  war  came,  the 
volume  of  business  grew  beyond  the  capacity  of  such  a  system 
to  handle  it  efficiently;  and  the  principal  production  bureaus 
thereupon  divided  the  country  into  manufacturing  districts 
and  placed  district  organizations,  subsidiary  to  the  bureau 


SETTLEMENT  OF  WAR  CONTRACTS        133 

headquarters  in  Washington,  in  charge  of  them.  The  bureaus 
in  Washington  continued  to  execute  contracts,  but  the  work 
of  superintending  manufacture,  inspecting  products,  and  pay- 
ing for  supplies  was  placed  in  the  hands  of  the  district  organi- 
zations. The  Ordnance  Department,  for  instance,  established 
twelve  manufacturing  districts  in  the  United  States  and  one 
in  Canada.  The  Director  of  Purchase,  in  charge  of  the  produc- 
tion of  quartermaster  supplies,  established  fourteen  such  dis- 
tricts, which  were  called  zones.  The  Air  Service  had  eight  dis- 
tricts and  the  Chemical  Warfare  Service  four.  All  production 
for  the  Signal  Corps,  Engineers,  Construction  Division,  and 
Medical  Department  was  administered  directly  from  Wash- 
ington. 

This  decentralization  of  the  field  administration  of  war 
industry  had  a  marked  effect  upon  its  efficiency.  The  adminis- 
trative ofHcers  in  charge  of  a  manufacturing  district  were  men 
of  high  standing  in  the  business  and  industry  of  their  respec- 
tive regions.  They  knew  the  manufacturers  in  those  regions. 
They  were  always  right  at  the  spot  when  difficulties  arose  in 
securing  raw  materials  and  fuel  and  shipping  priorities.  Even 
more  important,  each  district  organization  had  within  it  a 
representative  of  the  Finance  Service  of  the  Army.  The  War 
Department  was  empowered  to  make  advance  payments  on 
contracts  up  to  a  considerable  percentage  of  the  value  of  work 
done  or  supplies  actually  delivered.  These  advances,  as  we 
have  said  before,  enabled  the  munitions  producers  to  finance 
their  projects.  The  district  organizations,  maintaining  finance 
officers  in  the  field  as  they  did,  enabled  the  producers  to  obtain 
these  advances  in  a  minimum  of  time. 

Frequently  the  chief  executive  officers  of  the  manufacturing 
districts  were  civilians.  Each  district  board  maintained  a 
strong  legal  department  and  also  numerous  technical  assistants, 
not  the  least  among  which  were  the  cost  accountants.  Since  a 
great  portion  of  the  war  supplies  were  produced  on  the  cost- 
plus  plan,  the  war  brought  the  cost  accountant  into  great 
prominence,  during  both  the  period  of  production  and  the 
period  of  liquidation  afterwards. 


1 34  DEMOBILIZATION 

These  district  organizations,  in  immediate  contact  as  they 
were  with  the  producers,  comprised  an  organization  ready 
built  for  the  delicate  work  of  terminating  war  industry.  Wash- 
ington might  fix  policies  and  specify  the  classes  of  supplies  the 
production  of  which  was  to  be  stopped  and  the  sorts  which 
were  to  be  produced  after  the  armistice  in  full  or  curtailed 
quantities.  It  was  for  the  district  administrations  to  say  how 
the  terminations  and  reductions  should  be  carried  out.  Conse- 
quently, after  the  armistice  the  organizations  in  charge  of  the 
manufacturing  districts  were  changed  over  into  what  were 
variously  known  as  district  claims  boards  and  district  boards 
of  review.  Whatever  they  were  called  by  the  bureaus  creating 
them,  their  duties  were  essentially  the  same — to  terminate  con- 
tracts by  mutual  consent,  to  agree  with  the  producers  upon  the 
tenns  of  settlement,  to  take  over  in  the  name  of  the  War  De- 
partment such  finished  products,  raw  and  semi-finished  mate- 
rials, machinery,  buildings,  and  other  equipment  as  became 
government  property  under  the  terms  of  the  settlements,  and 
to  dispose  of  the  materials  thus  taken  over,  some  being 
selected  for  permanent  retention  among  the  nation's  war  assets, 
some  being  turned  over  to  other  branches  of  the  Government 
which  could  make  use  of  them,  and  others  being  disposed  of 
by  sale.  To  assist  it  in  this  work,  each  district  board  maintained 
a  subsidiary  organization  known  as  the  district  salvage  board, 
which  collected  the  government  property  and  disposed  of  it. 

To  supervise  this  field  activity,  each  procurement  bureau  of 
the  War  Department  established  at  headquarters  in  Washing- 
ton a  superior  board  known  as  the  bureau  claims  board.  Each 
of  these  supervisory  boards,  in  turn,  created  as  an  adjunct  to 
itself  a  bureau  salvage  board,  which  maintained  executive  con- 
trol over  the  district  salvage  boards.  For  several  weeks  there 
was  no  specific  executive  agency  to  direct  the  work  of  this 
organization,  except  that  all  the  bureau  and  district  boards 
were  under  the  general  authority  of  the  Director  of  Purchase, 
Storage,  and  Traffic.  He  unified  and  controlled  their  work 
through  what  were  known  as  supply  circulars,  a  medium  of 
administration  which  had  come  into  great  importance  after 


SETTLEMENT  OF  WAR  CONTRACTS        135 

the  creation  of  the  Division  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic. 
Through  the  supply  circulars  the  administration  of  war  indus- 
try issued  its  general  and  class  directions  to  the  production 
bureaus.  The  standard  contract  provisions,  for  instance,  had 
been  brought  to  the  attention  of  the  contracting  officers  by 
publication  in  the  supply  circulars.  The  series  of  supply  circu- 
lars thus  came  to  be  the  code  of  unified  army  supply. 

The  Director  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic,  however, 
had  many  duties  other  than  those  of  directing  the  demobiliza- 
tion, though  none  more  important.  It  was  realized  that  the 
system  needed  a  controlling  head,  the  sole  function  of  which 
would  be  to  administer  the  entire  liquidation  of  war  industry. 
Therefore,  late  in  January,  1919,  the  Secretary  of  War 
created  the  War  Department  Claims  Board,  into  which  were 
to  focus,  through  the  bureau  boards,  all  the  field  activities  in 
industrial  demobilization.  The  Assistant  Secretary  of  War 
became  the  president  of  this  board.  Mr.  G.  H.  Dorr,  who  was 
also  the  assistant  Director  of  Munitions,  and  Brigadier  Gen- 
eral (later  Major  General)  George  W.  Burr,  who  had  suc- 
ceeded General  G.  W.  Goethals  as  Director  of  Purchase, 
Storage,  and  Traffic,  were  the  first  regular  members  of  the 
War  Department  Claims  Board.  There  were  also  three  special 
members  and  a  recorder,  and  as  time  went  on  the  Board  was 
expanded  by  the  creation  of  subcommittees  of  experts  in 
various  legal  and  industrial  subjects. 

The  process  of  liquidation,  therefore,  originated  with  the 
district  boards.  In  settling  with  a  contractor,  the  district  board 
appraised  all  the  articles  completed  under  the  contract.  It 
examined  the  expenditures  which  the  contractor  had  made  and 
the  obligations  he  had  incurred  looking  toward  the  finished 
production.  Under  the  demobilization  policy  adopted,  the 
Government  was  responsible  for  both  of  these  costs.  It  paid  for 
completed  supplies  (the  price  including  the  contractor's 
profit),  for  raw  materials  purchased  for  the  contract  but  not 
used,  for  semi-finished  materials,  for  the  contractor's  obliga- 
tions to  his  subcontractors  (including  the  costs  of  canceling 
the  subcontracts),  and,  finally,  for  all  general  operating  costs. 


136  DEMOBILIZATION 

including  the  contractor's  "overhead"  expenses,  factory  and 
machine  depreciation  costs,  and  the  amortization  of  new  facili- 
ties built  at  the  Government's  behest.  To  the  most  important 
production  costs  (but  not  including  depreciation  or  amortiza- 
tion costs  or  interest  on  money  invested  in  materials)  the 
claims  boards  were  authorized  to  add  10  per  cent  of  the  sum 
as  the  contractor's  profit.  The  Government  paid  no  prospective 
profits,  but  only  a  fair  remuneration  for  work  actually  done. 

This  was  the  proposition  extended  to  the  manufacturer 
when  the  Government  proposed  to  him  the  voluntary  termina- 
tion of  his  contract.  Most  of  the  contractors  received  the  terms 
favorably:  they  did  not  wish  to  collect  money  for  work  not 
done,  even  though  theirs  was  the  technically  legal  right  to  do 
so.  If  any  producer  balked  at  the  policy,  he  always  had  the 
remedy  of  seeking  his  full  pound  of  flesh  in  the  Court  of 
Claims.  However,  the  slowness  of  procedure  in  the  Court 
of  Claims  made  this  a  weak  remedy;  and  even  if  the  Court  of 
Claims  finally  granted  him  his  exactions,  then  he  must  wait 
for  his  money  until  Congress  passed  an  act  appropriating  it 
from  the  Treasury.  Only  recently  Congress  passed  a  bill  to 
reimburse  the  estate  of  a  long-deceased  individual  who  was 
wrongfully  deprived  of  a  horse  during  the  Civil  War.  Such 
was  the  prospect  which  faced  the  contractor  unwilling  to 
accept  the  War  Department's  terms  of  settlement.  With  this 
coercive  potentiality  in  the  Government's  position,  the  Gov- 
ernment itself  fixed  the  terms  of  settlement,  at  least  in  broad 
outline ;  but  the  terms  were,  in  the  main,  fair  to  all  concerned. 

The  district  boards  proved  to  be  able  to  liquidate  most  of 
the  contracts  without  dispute.  From  these  boards  the  settle- 
ment agreements  went  up  for  approval  first  to  the  bureau 
claims  boards  and  finally  to  the  War  Department  Claims 
Board,  with  certain  exceptions  to  be  noted  later.  If  agreements 
could  not  be  reached  by  the  district  boards,  appeals  could  be 
taken  to  the  bureau  boards  and,  after  them,  to  the  War  De- 
partment Claims  Board.  The  last-named  body  designated  one 
of  its  members  to  sit  with  each  bureau  board  and  to  exercise 
the  authority  of  the  War  Department  Claims  Board  in  approv- 


SETTLEMENT  OF  WAR  CONTRACTS        137 

ing  all  settlements  after  action  by  the  bureau  board.  The 
approval  of  the  special  member,  acting  in  the  name  of  the 
Secretary  of  War,  constituted  the  final  step  in  the  settlement, 
which  then  passed  to  the  finance  officers  for  payment.  Thus 
only  a  few  of  the  27,000  suspended  contracts  reached  the  War 
Department  Claims  Board  for  detailed  consideration.  Nearly 
all  of  them  came  up  to  the  highest  authority  as  agreed-upon 
settlements,  needing  only  the  approval  of  the  proper  special 
member  of  the  War  Department  Claims  Board  before  being 
embodied  within  the  original  contracts  as  supplementary  agree- 
ments. Occasionally  questions  of  fact  arose  as  to  the  fidelity  of 
a  contractor's  performance  under  the  terms  of  his  contract. 
Such  questions  were  carried  by  appeal,  not  to  the  War  Depart- 
ment Claims  Board,  but  to  the  Department's  Board  of  Con- 
tract Adjustment,  which,  it  will  be  remembered,  was,  by  infer- 
ence, set  up  as  arbiter  of  such  questions  by  one  of  the  standard 
contract  provisions.  The  Board  of  Contract  Adjustment  had 
other  and  more  important  duties  in  connection  with  the  indus- 
trial liquidation,  as  will  be  shown  later. 

Now  this  settlement  system  was  able  to  render  an  impor- 
tant service  to  American  industry  during  the  demobilization. 
Many  of  the  contractors  had  gone  to  the  limit  of  their  re- 
sources in  procuring  buildings,  machinery,  materials,  and  work 
in  the  prosecution  of  their  contracts.  As  long  as  production 
was  continuing,  the  Government  could  finance  the  expansion 
by  making  advance  payments  to  the  cost-plus  contractors  and 
by  advancing  money  to  others  through  the  War  Credits 
Board.  But  when  the  contracts  were  terminated,  the  Govern- 
ment could  no  longer  follow  this  financing  system,  and  the  con- 
tractors faced  a  period  of  months  or  even  years  before  they 
could  conclude  their  settlements  with  the  Government.  Dur- 
ing all  that  time  their  invested  money  would  be  tied  up.  Some 
of  the  more  deeply  involved — and  large  concerns  they  were, 
too — were  perilously  near  actual  bankruptcy  as  a  result. 

For  the  relief  of  such  producers  the  War  Department  con- 
tinued in  demobilization  its  plan  of  advance  payments,  with, 
of  course,  a  difference.  Before  the  armistice  the  Government, 


138  DEMOBILIZATION 

in  making  advance  payments,  paid  a  percentage  of  the  cost  of 
work  actually  done.  After  the  armistice  no  work  to  speak  of 
was  being  done;  yet  in  practically  all  the  settlements  there 
were  numerous  items  of  cost  admittedly  legitimate  and  about 
which  there  was  no  dispute.  These  were  such  items  as  materials 
in  sight,  appraised,  and  invoiced  to  the  War  Department,  and 
such  items  as  the  contractor's  obligations  to  his  subcontractors. 
The  War  Department  adopted  the  policy  of  making  payments 
in  advance  of  final  settlement  up  to  75  per  cent  of  its  admitted 
obligations.  These  payments,  amounting  in  all  to  more  than 
$143,000,000,  enabled  the  producers  to  tide  over  the  period 
between  the  termination  of  work  and  the  final  settlement  with 
the  Government.  The  practice  of  maintaining  officers  of  the 
Finance  Service  as  members  of  the  district  claims  boards  facili- 
tated the  prompt  payment  of  these  advances.  In  the  final  set- 
tlements, of  course,  the  Government  subtracted  from  the 
amounts  due  from  it  to  the  producers  all  advances  made  to 
them. 

From  this  outline  it  will  be  seen  that  the  War  Department, 
in  striking  a  balance  with  war  industry,  set  up  within  itself 
what  was  essentially  a  system  of  courts,  with  a  regular  pro- 
cedure and  process  of  appeal  and — for  such  the  decisions  of 
the  War  Department  Claims  Board  came  to  be — a  body  of 
laws  and  precedents.  The  court  system,  however,  had  the  ad- 
vantage of  flexibility,  simplicity,  and  rapidity  of  action,  being 
hampered  by  none  of  the  rules  and  customs  that  circumscribe 
the  regular  courts.  The  war  department  courts,  if  we  may  call 
the  claims  boards  that,  were  courts  of  conciliation.  The  claim- 
ants partook  of  their  benefits  voluntarily.  They  might,  under 
certain  conditions,  at  any  time  appeal  to  the  regular  federal 
courts;  but  there  they  faced  years  of  litigation  before  they 
could  reach  final  settlement.  This  gave  the  war  department 
system  a  great  advantage,  which  the  Department  utilized  to 
obtain  advantageous  terms  for  itself;  yet  it  must  be  said  that 
the  entire  liquidation  was  conducted  in  a  spirit  of  desire  to  make 
the  contractors  whole  for  all  their  expenditures. 

We  are  now  in  a  position  to  understand  the  unavoidable 


I 


SETTLEMENT  OF  WAR  CONTRACTS        139 

injury  done  to  the  holders  of  the  informal  contracts  during 
the  first  months  after  the  armistice.  When  the  Comptroller  of 
the  Treasury  ruled  that  the  informal  contracts  were  invalid, 
he  foreclosed  the  War  Department  from  making  any  advance 
settlement  payments  to  these  victims  of  patriotism  and  haste. 
Many  of  them  were  as  heavily  obligated  financially  as  the 
holders  of  the  valid  contracts,  and  their  solvency  was  equally 
precarious.  Yet  not  a  dollar  of  government  money  could  they 
receive  until  the  wheels  of  legislation  had  ground  out  author- 
ity for  the  settlement  of  their  claims.  Some  of  their  circum- 
stances were  particularly  distressing. 

Early  in  October,  1918,  one  of  the  war  department  bureaus 
ordered  a  certain  manufacturer  to  produce  5,000  frames  for 
army  trucks  on  the  security  that  "formal  contract  will  follow." 
He  was  awaiting  the  arrival  of  this  document  to  justify  him  in 
making  commitments  for  materials  when  he  received  an  urgent 
message  from  Washington  beseeching  him  to  make  early  de- 
livery of  the  frames.  He  yielded,  and  without  waiting  for 
the  formal  contract  spent  over  $500,000  for  machinery  and 
materials.  The  armistice  was  signed  before  his  formal  contract 
was  executed,  and  then,  with  his  production  stopped,  he  was 
unable  to  collect  a  penny  of  the  money  due  him.  Another  man 
spent  $400,000  in  the  prosecution  of  a  contract,  only  to  find 
after  the  armistice  that  his  apparently  valid  contract  had  been 
improperly  signed  and  therefore  was  classed  among  the 
invalid  contracts. 

The  Dent  Law  gave  all  such  claims  a  legal  footing,  but  that 
act  was  not  in  force  until  March  2,  1919.  Meanwhile,  how- 
ever, the  War  Department's  liquidation  machinery  had  taken 
up  the  settlement  of  the  informal  contracts  along  with  the 
others.  The  district  boards  had  determined  for  many  of  them 
what  part  of  the  work  had  been  completed,  what  amounts  the 
Government  should  pay  for  materials  delivered,  what  reim- 
bursements the  producers  should  receive  for  expenditures  made 
in  preparation  for  production,  and  in  many  instances  had 
reached  complete  agreements  as  to  final  lump-sum  settlements. 
When  the  Dent  Law  went  on  the  statute  books,  these  agree- 


140  DEMOBILIZATION 

ments  needed  only  final  approval  to  become  operative;  and 
therefore  the  settlement  of  the  informal  claims  proceeded  with 
great  rapidity  after  the  passage  of  the  enabling  act. 

The  Dent  Law  conferred  upon  the  Secretary  of  War  power 
to  adjust  the  informal  contracts  on  equitable  terms,  with  the 
proviso  (already  adopted  as  policy  in  the  settlement  of  the 
valid  contracts)  that  no  prospective  profits  should  be  paid. 
This  power  the  Secretary  delegated  to  the  War  Department 
Claims  Board,  with  two  exceptions.  Invalid  contracts  made 
with  Canadian  producers  were  to  be  adjusted  by  the  Imperial 
Munitions  Board,  a  branch  of  the  British  Ministry  of  Muni- 
tions, which  had  acted  as  the  agent  of  the  War  Department 
in  procuring  army  supplies  in  Canada.  All  contracts  with  other 
foreign  producers — they  were  principally  French  and  British 
producers — were  to  be  settled  by  various  foreign  agencies  and 
representatives  of  the  War  Department. 

The  informal  contracts  with  American  producers  were  of 
two  sorts — those  of  which  there  was  written  evidence  and 
those  of  which  there  was  no  written  evidence.  The  former  were 
known  as  Class  A  contracts  and  the  latter  as  Class  B.  The 
Class  A  contracts  were  contracts  apparently  formal  but  im- 
properly executed,  or  procurement  orders,  or  correspondence 
setting  forth  the  contract  terms.  The  Class  B  contracts  were 
agreements  wholly  or  in  part  oral.  The  Class  A  contracts  pre- 
sented no  difficulty  to  the  War  Department  Claims  Board, 
and  they  were  put  through  to  settlement  by  the  regular  pro- 
cedure. It  required  the  taking  of  testimony  to  establish  the 
terms  of  Class  B  contracts,  and  the  War  Department  Claims 
Board,  with  its  subsidiary  boards,  had  its  hands  too  full  with 
the  regular  routine  of  liquidation  to  add  to  its  business  this 
new,  voluminous  work;  and  therefore  it  in  turn  delegated  the 
duty  of  establishing  the  terms  of  the  Class  B  contracts  to  the 
Board  of  Contract  Adjustment,  the  creation  of  which  was 
noted  above. 

The  Board  of  Contract  Adjustment  heard  witnesses  and 
then  rendered  a  decision  as  to  the  terms  of  a  Class  B  contract. 
After  that  it  did  one  of  two  things :  it  referred  the  now  estab- 


SETTLEMENT  OF  WAR  CONTRACTS        141 

lished  contract  to  the  proper  district  board  for  settlement,  or 
else  it  determined  itself  the  financial  obligation  of  the  Govern- 
ment and  issued  an  award  to  the  producer.  In  addition  to  this 
work  the  War  Department  Board  of  Contract  Adjustment,  as 
a  convenient  agency,  also  settled  contracts  of  all  sorts  made 
by  such  presidential  agencies  as  the  War  Industries  Board  and 
the  United  States  Food  Administration. 

After  the  Dent  Act  was  in  operation,  the  War  Department 
extended  to  the  informal  contractors  also  the  privilege  of  re- 
ceiving partial  payments  in  advance  of  final  settlement. 

Such,  in  outline,  was  the  system  which  liquidated  the  war 
industry  and  struck  the  balance  between  the  War  Department 
and  the  munitions  producers.  A  few  details  of  organization 
should  be  noted.  The  War  Department  Claims  Board  greatly 
expanded  its  own  organization  during  the  episode  by  creating 
various  subsidiary  bodies.  One  of  these  was  its  Standing  Com- 
mittee (composed  of  members  of  the  Board),  which  did  most 
of  the  actual  work  for  the  Board  and  presented  its  acts  for  the 
consideration  of  the  entire  Board  in  the  form  of  resolutions. 
These  resolutions  in  time  became  a  body  of  precedents  to 
standardize  the  whole  procedure.  To  handle  engineering  and 
other  technical  questions,  the  War  Department  Claims  Board 
created  its  Technical  Section,  which,  in  turn,  established 
within  itself  its  Plant  Valuation  Group,  made  up  of  men  spe- 
cially qualified  to  appraise  the  contemporary  value  of  plants 
erected  for  the  War  Department  by  producers  with  the  under- 
standing that  the  Department  would  pay  for  these  plants,  or 
an  agreed-upon  portion  of  their  cost.  The  Special  Auditing 
Committee  of  the  Board  also  conducted  a  work  of  great  im- 
portance. During  the  war  numerous  manufacturers  held  con- 
tracts with  two  or  more  production  bureaus  of  the  War  De- 
partment. After  the  armistice  they  filed  separate  claims  for 
the  settlement  of  such  contracts.  There  was  always  danger  that 
in  these  claims  there  would  be  duplicate  items  of  such  costs  as 
overhead  expense  and  plant  deterioration.  The  Auditing  Com- 
mittee consolidated  the  claims  of  individual  producers  and 
thus  enabled  the  War  Department  Claims  Board  to  strike  out 


•142  DEMOBILIZATION 

duplicate  items  of  cost.  Numerous  contractors  followed  the 
old  peace-time  procedure  of  filing  claims  with  the  auditor  of 
the  War  Department.  So  many  claims  originated  from  this 
source  that  the  War  Department  Claims  Board  established 
in  the  office  of  the  Director  of  Finance  a  Classification  Board 
to  separate  all  claims  coming  to  the  auditor  and  to  refer  them 
to  the  proper  bureau  boards. 

This  system  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  settlement  of  claims 
arising  out  of  the  War  Department's  operations  in  real  estate 
during  the  war.  There  were  thousands  of  claims  for  damage 
done  to  property  incidental  to  the  training  of  the  Army.  To 
settle  such  claims  the  Secretary  of  War  utilized  the  existing 
War  Department  Board  of  Appraisers,  which  had  been  created 
to  establish  the  values  of  commandeered  property.  The  com- 
manders of  military  posts  investigated  the  validity  of  real 
estate  claims  and  recommended  awards.  These,  after  approval 
by  the  Board  of  Appraisers  and  the  Secretary  of  War,  were 
paid  by  the  auditor  of  the  War  Department.  Numerous  real 
estate  claims  arose  under  informal  and  invalid  agreements, 
and  the  condition  of  such  claimants  was  usually  particularly 
helpless.  When  the  War  Department  started  to  build  its  great 
trinitrotoluol  plant  at  Racine,  Wisconsin,  a  large  number  of 
persons,  home  owners  and  renters,  moved  off  the  site  without 
the  formality  of  written  contracts.  Many  of  these  individuals 
sold  their  farm  animals  and  household  goods.  The  armistice 
cut  short  the  construction  of  the  plant,  and  then  the  property 
owners  discovered  that  they  were  without  legal  standing  be- 
fore the  Government.  The  Dent  Law  enabled  the  Department 
to  settle  these  and  other  real  estate  claims  arising  under  infor- 
mal contracts,  and  the  Board  of  Appraisers  made  the  settle- 
ments. 

The  Canadian  contracts,  both  formal  and  informal,  were 
adjusted  by  the  Imperial  Munitions  Board,  acting  in  conjunc- 
tion with  two  American  officers  called  assessors,  one  of  whom 
was  a  special  member  of  the  War  Department  Claims  Board. 
Mr.  D.  C.  Jackling,  the  director  of  United  States  Government 
Explosives  Plants,  adjusted  all  the  outstanding  contracts  and 


SETTLEMENT  OF  WAR  CONTRACTS        143 

orders  in  connection  with  the  construction  of  the  Nitro  (West 
Virginia)  Powder  Plant.  More  than  3,200  firms  and  individ- 
uals had  received  orders  for  materials  for  the  plant,  and  a  fire 
at  the  plant  immediately  after  the  armistice  destroyed  the 
records  of  all  open  orders.  The  terms  of  these  orders  were 
reestablished  by  correspondence  with  the  contractors.  A  special 
settlement  board  within  the  Ordnance  Department  adjusted 
the  terminated  contracts  for  the  construction  of  nitrogen  fixa- 
tion plants  authorized  as  a  war  measure.  The  Spruce  Produc- 
tion Corporation  of  the  Air  Service  terminated  and  settled  its 
own  contracts  with  the  spruce  lumber  interests  in  the  North- 
west. 

On  July  1,  1920,  the  War  Department  Claims  Board,  which 
had  conducted  the  liquidation  of  the  Department's  war  busi- 
ness (with  the  small  exceptions  noted  above)  ended  its  work 
and  disbanded,  turning  over  to  the  regular  military  organiza- 
tion of  the  War  Department  the  residue  and  remnant  of  work 
still  left.  Of  the  27,000  war  contracts,  26,000  had  been  termi- 
nated and  settled  by  the  Department.  There  were  still  995 
claims  pending,  or  less  than  4  per  cent  of  the  original  number; 
but  more  than  half  the  auditing  and  other  preliminary  work 
on  these  995  claims  was  done.  The  liquidation  was  therefore 
more  than  98  per  cent  complete,  and  this  in  little  more  than  a 
year  and  a  half  after  the  Government  halted  the  mightiest 
industrial  undertaking  upon  which  any  people  ever  embarked. 
The  promptness  and  wisdom  shown  in  that  settlement  had 
allowed  war  industry  to  taper  off  and  stop  without  shock  to  the 
economic  structure  of  the  country,  had  stabilized  business, 
relieved  the  banks  of  the  country  of  a  vast  load  of  debt  which 
they  were  carrying  for  the  war  producers,  and  thus  had 
brought  the  nation  safely  and  easily  through  what  might 
otherwise  have  been  the  sharpest  business  crisis  it  had  ever 
known.  Concretely,  in  dollars  and  cents,  this  work  was  of 
great  material  benefit  to  the  Government  and  people  of  the 
United  States.  The  rate  of  liquidation  of  the  unfinished  por- 
tions of  the  war  contracts  averaged  fourteen  cents  to  the 
dollar — that  is,  the  payment  of  fourteen  cents  by  the  Govern- 


144  DEMOBILIZATION 

ment  satisfied  and  wiped  out  a  contractual  obligation  of  one 
dollar.  At  this  ratio,  the  settlements  effected  by  the  War 
Department  Claims  Board  saved  the  people  of  this  country 
from  having  to  pay  out  well  over  $3,300,000,000. 


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CHAPTER  X 
ORDNANCE  DEMOBILIZATION 

WHEN  the  average  man  speaks  of  munitions,  he 
means  ordnance  and,  even  more  specifically,  guns 
and  ammunition.  In  this  he  is  nearly  half  right. 
Technically,  the  word  "munitions"  includes  army  supplies  of 
all  sorts,  even  to  candy  and  cigarettes,  and  in  this  sense  the 
word  is  used  in  these  volumes;  but  of  the  total  war  business 
transacted  for  the  Army,  the  procurement  of  ordnance  sup- 
plies constituted  42  per  cent.  Ordnance  was  by  far  the  largest 
class  of  munitions.  Four  thousand  American  manufacturing 
plants  worked  on  ordnance  contracts  during  the  war.  Nearly 
3,000,000  men  labored  in  these  mills. 

The  mere  size  of  the  war  ordnance  industry  would  have 
made  the  problem  of  its  demobilization  a  great  one,  but  it  was 
also  complicated  with  peculiar  difficulties.  The  production  of 
most  ordnance  materials  differed  radically  from  that  of  any 
articles  known  in  normal  American  industry.  The  Quarter- 
master Department  procured  for  the  Army  food,  clothing, 
shoes,  hand  tools,  and  many  other  supplies  which,  though  they 
were  frequently  of  special  design,  nevertheless  were  not  much 
unlike  the  sorts  of  commodities  with  which  the  contractors 
were  already  familiar.  The  Engineer  Corps  used  many  mate- 
rials commonly  employed  in  the  peaceful  pursuits.  Outside 
of  ordnance,  the  manufacture  of  aircraft  alone  took  our 
industries  into  virgin  fields  of  endeavor. 

Therefore,  those  factories  which  were  making  for  the  Army 
products  essentially  similar  to  products  consumed  by  the 
civilian  population,  were  ready  after  the  armistice  to  resume 
their  places  in  normal  commerce  with  slight  internal  adjust- 


146  DEMOBILIZATION 

ment.  But  the  ordnance  factories — they  were  a  different  story. 
In  ordnance  production  the  war  had  witnessed  some  factory 
conversions  of  the  most  violent  sort.  Manufacturers  of  print- 
ing presses  built  gun  carriages  of  new  and  difficult  design; 
makers  of  sewing  machines  and  automobiles  undertook  the 
difficult  task  of  producing  hydropneumatic  recuperators  for 
absorbing  the  recoil  of  field  guns;  producers  of  typewriters 
and  water  meters  manufactured  time  fuses  for  shell ;  women's 
cloak  factories  sewed  silk  powder  bags;  a  phonograph  maker 
produced  aerial  bomb  sights;  and  one  producer  turned  from 
the  modem  business  of  making  corsets  and  took  up  the  ancient 
occupation  of  tentmaker.  For  nearly  all  these  factories  the 
ordnance  contracts  virtually  implied  the  physical  reequipment 
of  their  plants  for  quite  different  manufacturing  processes.  For 
them,  too,  demobilization  meant  a  not  less  severe  dislocation 
of  equipment  and  processes  in  changing  back  again  to  their 
former  work. 

It  was  the  problem  of  the  Ordnance  Department  after  the 
armistice  to  manage  the  liquidation  of  its  great  war  business — 
to  halt  the  work,  to  dispose  of  raw  materials  and  materials  left 
half  completed  when  the  wheels  stopped,  to  do  something  with 
the  special  factories  and  even  the  complete  towns  built  by  the 
Government  or  for  the  Government  in  the  prosecution  of  the 
war  enterprise,  to  recoup  the  millions  advanced  to  finance  the 
ordnance  producers,  and  finally  to  settle  with  cash  the  obliga- 
tions of  the  Government  to  the  producers  incurred  when  the 
contracts  were  terminated. 

Although  in  size  and  intricacy  this  problem  was  appalling, 
there  was  no  hesitation  in  setting  about  solving  it,  no  period 
when  the  enterprise  hung  in  neutral,  going  neither  forward 
nor  backward.  Ordnance  work  was  reaching  new  peaks  of  pro- 
duction when  the  Ordnance  Department  in  Washington  took 
the  first  steps  toward  its  dismemberment.  In  late  October, 
1918,  when  the  Argonne-Meuse  offensive  was  striking  home 
and  it  was  becoming  evident  that  the  curtain  might  at  any 
time  fall  in  the  theatre  of  war,  the  chief  ordnance  officers  held 
a  secret  meeting  one  Sunday  afternoon  in  Washington  and 


ORDNANCE  DEMOBILIZATION  147 

for  the  first  time  considered  the  possible  demobilization.  At 
this  meeting  the  Chief  of  Ordnance  appointed  a  commission 
to  make  a  rapid  study  of  the  organization  of  the  Ordnance 
Department  to  determine  whether  that  organization  was  fitted 
to  turn  without  change  to  the  stoppage  of  work  and  the  res- 
toration of  the  industry  to  its  former  basis.  This  same  com- 
mission later  became  the  Ordnance  Claims  Board,  the  agency 
which  supervised  the  entire  demobilization  of  ordnance  indus- 
try. It  was,  of  course,  like  all  the  other  bureau  claims  boards, 
subsidiary  to  the  War  Department  Claims  Board.  The  Ord- 
nance Claims  Board  was  formally  created  by  order  on  Novem- 
ber 2,  and  thus  had  been  in  existence  for  nine  days  when  the 
armistice  was  signed.  Its  chief  was  Brigadier  General  W.  S. 
Peirce.  Its  members  were  Colonel  R.  P.  Lamont,  who  was 
president  of  the  American  Steel  Foundries  Corporation  before 
and  after  his  military  service  in  the  World  War;  Colonel 
G.  H.  Stewart,  an  ordnance  officer  of  the  Regular  Army; 
Lieutenant  Colonel  M.  F.  Briggs,  counselor  at  law.  New 
York;  Lieutenant  Colonel  F.  R.  Ayer,  recorder  of  the  Eastern 
Manufacturing  Company,  of  Bangor,  Maine ;  and  Mr.  Waldo 
H.  Marshall,  president  of  the  American  Locomotive  Company, 
New  York. 

This  board  found  an  existing  organization — the  field  admin- 
istrations of  the  thirteen  ordnance  manufacturing  districts — 
admirably  adapted  to  the  work  of  closing  up  the  war  business. 
The  district  organizations  had  been  created  to  give  the  Ord- 
nance Department  a  mechanism  by  which  it  could  keep  in 
immediate  contact  with  the  process  of  manufacture  without 
congesting  the  headquarters  in  Washington  to  the  point  where 
competent  management  became  impossible.  They  had  been 
likened  roughly  to  the  fire  exits  of  a  theatre,  distributed  to 
prevent  crowding  at  the  front  doors.  In  the  district  organiza- 
tions were  employed  33,000  civilians,  uniformed  officers,  and 
enlisted  men,  and  through  this  great  force  the  office  in  Wash- 
ington kept  in  as  intimate  touch  with  the  work,  the  trials,  and 
the  accomplishments  of  its  producers  as  if  it  had  been  employ- 
ing the  services  of  but  a  single  factory.  The  ordnance  field 


148  DEMOBILIZATION 

men  knew  the  war  factories  as  they  knew  their  own  offices. 
They  were  acquainted  with  the  contractors,  with  the  subcon- 
tractors, with  the  shop  superintendents  and  foremen,  and 
often  with  the  workmen  themselves.  Obviously  they  were 
qualified  to  judge  at  what  rate  production  could  be  stopped 
without  injury  to  the  industry  or  its  workmen  and  to  deter- 
mine the  settlement  adjustments  that  would  be  fair  to  both 
sides. 

It  is  worth  while  pausing  a  moment  to  examine  the  thirteen 
ordnance  districts  and  to  note  their  headquarters  cities,  their 
extent,  the  characteristic  sorts  of  ordnance  supplies  produced 
in  each,  and  the  chief  production  officer  of  each, 

Toronto.  Embraced  the  whole  of  Canada.  Produced  prin- 
cipally shell  machined  and  ready  for  loading,  particularly 
75-millimeter  shell.  As  noted  in  the  preceding  chapter,  all 
industrial  demobilization  in  Canada  was  carried  out  by  the 
Imperial  Munitions  Board,  two  of  the  members  of  which 
were  special  representatives  of  the  War  Department  Claims 
Board,  sent  to  Canada  after  the  armistice  for  this  purpose. 

Bridgeport.  Included  Connecticut  and  four  Massachusetts 
counties.  Primarily  the  small-arms  district,  producing  all  the 
pistols  and  revolvers,  all  the  bayonets,  all  the  automatic  rifles, 
more  than  a  million  of  the  service  rifles,  most  of  the  heavy 
machine  guns,  and  almost  all  the  small-arms  ammunition 
delivered  under  war  contracts.  Mr.  Waldo  C,  Bryant  of 
Bridgeport  was  chief  of  the  district. 

Boston.  Included  the  rest  of  New  England.  The  chief  pro- 
ducer of  soldiers'  belts,  haversacks,  mess  kits,  and  other  per- 
sonal ordnance  equipment;  produced  small-arms  ammunition 
heavily,  and  produced  also  boosters  and  adapters  (for  shell) 
and  carriages  for  155-millimeter  howitzers.  Mr.  Levi  H. 
Greenwood,  chief  of  district. 

New  York.  Included  New  York  City,  Long  Island,  and 
nine  other  New  York  and  twelve  New  Jersey  counties.  The 
prime  producer  of  trench-warfare  ordnance.  Produced  much 
toluol  and  was  a  finisher  of  shell,  fuses,  and  cartridge  cases. 
Loaded   more    than    one-third    of    all    artillery    ammunition 


ORDNANCE  DEMOBILIZATION  149 

shipped  abroad.  Chief,  Mr.  George  J.  Roberts,  vice-president 
of  the  Public  Service  Corporation  of  New  Jersey. 

Philadelphia.  Included  eastern  Pennsylvania,  part  of  New 
Jersey,  and  all  of  Delaware.  The  chief  service-rifle  producer 
and  a  chief  producer  of  high  explosives.  Immense  shell-load- 
ing activities.  Chief,  Mr.  John  C.  Jones,  president  of  the 
Harrison  Safety  Boiler  Works. 

Baltimore.  Included  all  of  Maryland  but  two  western  coun- 
ties, and  all  of  the  District  of  Columbia  and  the  states  of 
Virginia  and  North  and  South  Carolina.  The  leading  shrapnel- 
loading  district  and  a  great  shell-loading  area.  Contained  the 
largest  of  the  ammonium  nitrate  plants.  Produced  all  the 
37-millimeter  guns.  Chief,  Lieutenant  Colonel  A.  V.  Barnes, 
formerly  president  of  the  American  Book  Company. 

Rochester.  Embraced  all  the  state  of  New  York  not  in  the 
New  York  City  district.  Chief  production  was  in  Lewis 
machine  guns,  Enfield  rifles,  75-millimeter  field  guns,  shrap- 
nel, picric  acid,  and  optical  glass.  Chief,  Mr.  Frank  S.  Noble, 
executive  officer  of  the  Eastman  Kodak  Company. 

Cleveland.  Northern  Ohio  and  three  northwestern  counties 
of  Pennsylvania.  Produced  completed  big  guns,  shell  fuses, 
75-millimeter  gun  carriages,  mounts  for  railway  artillery,  and 
6-ton  tanks.  Chief,  Mr.  Samuel  Scovil,  former  president  of 
the  Cleveland  Electric  Illuminating  Company. 

Detroit.  Included  the  state  of  Michigan.  Produced  gun  re- 
coil recuperators,  artillery  vehicles,  large-caliber  shell,  and 
trench-mortar  shell.  Chief,  Mr.  Fred  J.  Robinson,  president 
of  the  Lowery-Robinson  Lumber  Company. 

Chicago.  Included  northern  Illinois  and  the  band  of  states 
to  the  northwest  as  far  as  Montana.  Produced  caterpillar 
traction  for  the  tanks  and  artillerj-^  guns,  carriages,  recupera- 
tors, projectiles,  and  grenades;  the  district  was  also  saturated 
with  contracts  for  machinery  for  the  eastern  munitions  plants. 
Chief,  Mr.  E.  A.  Russell,  vice-president  of  the  Otis  Elevator 
Company. 

Pittsburg.  Included  western  Pennsylvania  except  three 
counties,  two  counties  of  western  Maryland,  two  counties  of 


1 50  DEMOBILIZATION 

Ohio,  and  all  of  West  Virginia.  The  prime  subcontract  dis« 
trict  for  the  production  of  raw  steel  and  steel  forgings.  Herein 
was  located  the  Neville  Island  ordnance  plant  project.  Pro- 
duced optical  glass  in  quantity.  Chief,  Mr.  Ralph  M.  Dravo, 
of  Dravo  Brothers,  contractors,  Pittsburg. 

Cincinnati.  Southern  Ohio,  Indiana,  and  the  South.  Was 
the  chief  nitrogen-fixation  district  and  the  chief  producer  of 
smokeless  powder.  Included  Dayton,  with  200  factories  ex- 
clusively engaged  in  munitions  production.  Produced  tanks, 
shell,  fuses,  optical  instruments,  and  machine  tools  for  war 
factories.  District  chief,  Mr.  C.  L.  Harrison,  a  Cincinnati 
capitalist. 

St.  Louis.  Included  southern  Indiana  and  sixteen  western 
states.  Produced  black  walnut,  toluol,  and  picric  acid.  Chief, 
Mr.  Marvin  E.  Singleton,  former  president  of  the  East  St. 
Louis  Cotton  Oil  Company. 

After  the  armistice  the  manufacturing  committees  in  charge 
of  the  twelve  American  ordnance  districts  became,  without 
essential  change  in  their  organization,  the  ordnance  district 
claims  boards.  Each  board  consisted  of  seven  members — busi- 
ness men  and  at  least  one  lawyer — with  such  technical  assist- 
ants as  they  needed.  The  first  executive  act  in  demobilization 
for  these  boards  to  make  was  to  determine  what  war  contracts 
were  to  be  terminated  immediately,  what  ones  were  to  be 
tapered  off  with  a  minimum  expense  to  the  Government  and  a 
minimum  disturbance  to  industry  and  labor,  and  what  ones 
were  to  be  carried  through  to  completion. 

It  was  often  advantageous  to  allow  the  contractors  to  pro- 
ceed undisturbed.  Some  of  these  ordnance  supplies,  which 
would  be  valuable  and  essential  items  of  our  military  equip- 
ment for  years  to  come,  were  only  just  reaching  the  stage  of 
production  in  the  factories,  after  many  months  of  costly  ex- 
periment and  preparation.  It  was  obviously  unwise  to  inter- 
rupt these  projects  with  nothing  to  show  for  them  except 
heavy  bills  of  expenses.  Then,  too,  it  was  sometimes  of  finan- 
cial advantage  to  the  Government  to  allow  a  contract  to  go 
through  to  completion.  A  contractor  in  the  Chicago  district, 


ORDNANCE  DEMOBILIZATION  151 

for  example,  had  nearly  completed  the  manufacture  of  several 
large  machines  for  installation  in  an  eastern  munitions  plant. 
To  cancel  the  contract  would  have  cost  the  Government 
$90,000  in  a  settlement  and  left  on  its  hands  a  quantity  of 
semi-finished  materials  having  only  junk  value.  The  Govern- 
ment no  longer  had  use  for  the  finished  machines ;  yet  it  would 
cost  only  $14,000  more  to  go  on  and  complete  them.  This  was 
done,  and  the  Ordnance  Department  was  later  able  to  sell  the 
machines  to  a  private  buyer  for  more  than  $100,000,  thus 
recovering  practically  all  the  money  it  paid  to  the  contractor. 

To  provide  a  basis  of  fact  for  all  such  acts  of  administra- 
tion in  the  demobilization,  the  district  boards  first  took  a  rapid 
but  thorough  inventory  of  the  ordnance  industrial  situation. 
This  they  did  by  means  of  questionnaires  sent  to  all  the  con- 
tractors. Each  questionnaire,  when  returned  to  the  district 
board,  showed  the  status  of  the  contract  at  the  time  and  how 
the  contractor's  business  and  his  employees  would  be  affected 
by  a  termination.  The  general  ordnance  policy  was  to  permit 
contractors  (after  the  first  emergency  suspension  which,  it  will 
be  remembered,  had  been  requested  immediately  after  the 
armistice  was  signed)  to  continue  their  work  on  a  diminishing 
scale  for  a  few  weeks,  while  they  made  their  arrangements  to 
engage  once  more  in  commercial  work.  Some  of  the  contracts, 
including  all  the  late,  standardized  ones,  provided  for  the 
termination  of  work  upon  thirty  days'  notice.  If,  however, 
the  enforcement  of  this  provision  would  create  any  consider- 
able amount  of  unemployment,  the  district  boards  allowed 
such  contractors  to  complete  an  average  thirty  days'  produc- 
tion, but  to  spread  out  the  work  over  a  longer  period  of  time. 

There  were  variations  of  the  general  policy  when  it  was 
applied  to  special  classes  of  ordnance  industry.  For  instance, 
the  many  contractors  who  were  machine-finishing  the  artillery 
shell  were  permitted  to  keep  their  plants  in  full  operation  until 
January  31,  1919,  when  the  work  had  to  cease  abruptly.  All 
source  industries — industries,  that  is,  producing  rough  forg- 
ings  and  other  raw  and  semi-finished  materials  for  ordnance 
manufacture — were  taken  from  war  work  forthwith.  Then, 


152  DEMOBILIZATION 

too,  as  noted,  in  various  classes  of  large  ordnance,  or  ordnance 
of  exceedingly  difficult  manufacture,  the  orders  were  greatly 
reduced  and  the  contractors  permitted  to  go  ahead  and  com- 
plete the  residue,  no  matter  how  long  it  might  take.  Such  ord- 
nance included  gun  carriages,  recuperators,  tanks,  optical 
instruments,  and  other  supplies  of  the  sort.  This  reduced  pro- 
duction continued  for  more  than  a  year  after  the  general  stop- 
page of  war  industry.  Some  of  the  Mark  VIII  tanks  (the 
Anglo-American  design)  were  delivered  to  the  Army  as  late 
as  June  i,  1920. 

So  expeditiously  was  the  work  of  termination  carried  on  in 
the  other  classes  of  manufacture  (and  these  made  up  the 
greater  part  of  the  ordnance  industry)  that  by  January  1, 
1919,  nearly  all  war  ordnance  production  had  either  been 
terminated  altogether  or  was  dwindling  to  the  vanishing  point 
under  specific  agreements.  After  February  1  the  only  war 
ordnance  factories  in  operation  were  the  exceptional  plants 
noted  in  the  preceding  paragraph. 

Even  as  the  ordnance  industry  was  being  stopped,  the  Gov- 
ernment was  coming  to  an  understanding  with  the  ordnance 
contractors  as  to  the  settlement  of  their  claims.  To  this  end, 
in  most  of  the  manufacturing  districts  the  board  members 
traveled  from  city  to  city,  addressing  large  meetings  of  the 
contractors  and  explaining  to  them  the  general  liquidation 
policy  adopted  by  the  War  Department.  In  its  broad  outlines, 
this  policy  was  as  follows:  The  Government  would  take  off 
the  contractor's  hands  at  cost  all  materials  which  he  had  spe- 
cifically purchased  for  his  contract,  but  which  he  had  not 
used.  The  Government  would  reimburse  him  for  all  work  done 
on  his  contract,  for  all  materials  used,  for  all  money  paid  out 
in  wages,  and  for  all  legitimate  overhead  expense,  the  Gov- 
ernment in  return  taking  over  all  materials  in  the  various 
stages  of  their  completion.  Further,  the  Government  would 
regard  as  proper  costs  whatever  it  cost  the  contractor  to  ter- 
minate and  settle  his  subcontracts,  and  would  pay  these  costs. 
Finally,  in  specific  instances  the  Government  would  pay 
money  in  amortization  of  the  cost  of  machinery  and  tools 


ORDNANCE  DEMOBILIZATION  153 

bought  especially  for  war  use,  the  sum  to  be  proportioned  to 
the  amount  of  work  completed.  And  whatever  else  the  con- 
tractor was  out  of  pocket  legitimately,  the  Government  would 
pay.  When  the  various  costs  were  brought  together  as  a  lump, 
to  this  sum  the  Government  would  add  10  per  cent  as  profit. 
It  would,  moreover,  allow  6  per  cent  interest  on  money  which 
the  contractor  had  invested  in  materials,  reckoning  from  the 
average  time  of  purchase  to  the  date  of  the  settlement;  but  it 
would  not  allow  10  per  cent  profit  on  this  investment  in  addi- 
tion. 

These  terms  received  widespread  acceptance,  although  they 
allowed  no  prospective  profits,  and  thereupon  the  various  dis- 
tricts became  scenes  of  great  activity  as  the  ordnance  officers 
worked  with  the  contractors  to  expedite  the  presentation  of 
settlement  claims  by  the  latter.  Inspectors  and  agents  em- 
ployed by  the  district  boards  checked  manufacturers'  inven- 
tories, and  boxed  and  set  aside  materials  to  be  delivered  to 
the  Government,  while  district  accountants  audited  the  costs 
statements.  Each  field  agent  of  a  district  board  was  made 
responsible  for  a  few  specific  claims.  He  stood  at  the  con- 
tractor's elbow  and  helped  him  rough  out  his  claim  into  proper 
form.  A  spirit  of  amiability  prevailed.  For  many  reasons  the 
contractor  wished  to  make  his  settlement  as  quickly  as  possible, 
and  the  district  agent  was  there  to  tell  him  what  items  in  his 
claim  were  indisputable,  and  what  ones  were  likely  to  be  con- 
tested, thereby  holding  up  the  final  settlement.  When  the  dis- 
trict agent  and  the  contractor  had  agreed  as  to  a  claim,  they 
submitted  it  informally  to  one  of  the  members  of  the  district 
claims  board  for  his  opinion.  If  he  thought  his  board  would 
be  unlikely  to  allow  certain  items,  the  contractor  could  usually 
be  persuaded  to  omit  such  items.  Claims  prepared  under  such 
conditions  presented  little  difficulty  to  the  various  claims 
boards,  and  most  of  them  went  through  to  settlement  without 
a  hitch  in  the  proceedings. 

Most  contractors  were  willing  to  forego  their  technical 
rights  in  order  to  save  the  Government  from  paying  for  use- 
less production,  but  a  few  were  obdurate.  One  man,  working 


1 54  DEMOBILIZATION 

under  a  contract  with  a  thirty-day  termination  clause,  delib- 
erately increased  his  rate  of  production  five  times  in  order  to 
collect  a  maximum  amount  from  the  Government.  When  the 
Ordnance  Department  discovered  his  plan,  it  breached  the  con- 
tract outright  and  allowed  the  producer  to  take  his  grievance, 
if  he  continued  to  nurse  one,  into  the  courts.  A  rare  instance 
of  this  sort,  however,  is  cited  only  to  show  by  contrast  the 
prevalent  attitude  of  industrial  cooperation  with  the  Govern- 
ment. Numerous  producers  omitted  from  their  claims  many 
items  the  validity  of  which  could  probably  have  been  sus- 
tained in  the  future  negotiations,  but  which  were,  however, 
subject  to  close  scrutiny  and  therefore  a  factor  of  delay  in  the 
settlements. 

The  wheels  of  war  industry  had  not  ceased  to  turn  before 
the  Government  began  to  make  advance  payments  in  settle- 
ment of  the  industrial  claims.  If  the  contractors  were  generous, 
so  was  the  Government.  The  first  settlement  made  illustrated 
the  War  Department's  attitude  right  through.  A  New  York 
contractor  had  submitted  a  claim  for  about  $15,000.  On  Jan- 
uary 20,  1919,  he  informed  the  New  York  District  Claims 
Board  that  two  days  later  he  had  to  meet  a  note  for  $10,000, 
a  debt  incurred  in  prosecution  of  his  war  contract.  A  member 
of  the  New  York  Claims  Board  took  this  claim  in  person  to 
Washington  and  next  day  secured  its  approval  by  the  Ord- 
nance Claims  Board,  together  with  an  authorization  to  ad- 
vance $10,000  to  the  contractor  pending  the  final  approval 
and  settlement  by  the  War  Department  Claims  Board.  The 
New  York  district  finance  officer  paid  over  the  $10,000  in 
time  to  save  the  note  from  going  to  protest. 

As  the  weeks  went  on  the  New  York  manufacturer's  plight 
was  duplicated  over  and  over  again.  The  producers  of  ord- 
nance supplies,  after  the  termination  of  their  contracts,  faced 
enormous  financial  obligations  which  they  would  have  to  meet 
long  before  the  machinery  of  liquidation  could  act  upon  their 
claims.  To  such  producers  the  system  of  advance  partial  pay- 
ments afforded  great  relief.  The  policy  of  advance  payments 
not  only  saved  numerous  concerns  from  financial  ruin,  but  it 


ORDNANCE  DEMOBILIZATION  155 

stimulated  the  general  commercial  reconstruction  and  resump- 
tion of  normal  business  by  releasing  large  sums  of  money  and 
putting  it  again  into  circulation.  And,  it  should  not  be  for- 
gotten, the  system  greatly  aided  the  Government  to  secure 
favorable  settlement  terms  from  the  contractors  by  offering 
the  reward  of  early  payments  to  those  whose  war  business  was 
quickly  liquidated. 

Since  the  prime  contractors'  subcontract  settlements  were 
acknowledged  costs  which  the  Government  was  bound  to  pay 
in  the  prime  settlements,  it  was  vitally  important  that  the 
Ordnance  Department  intervene  to  obtain  for  the  prime  con- 
tractors the  most  favorable  terms  possible  in  the  settlement  of 
their  subcontracts.  Every  subcontractor,  of  course,  had  the 
legal  right  to  insist  upon  the  full  performance  of  his  contract, 
and  he  was  not  to  be  coerced  by  the  bogey  of  the  Court  of 
Claims  and  its  long-drawn-out  procedure.  He  could  go  into 
the  state  courts  and  enforce  his  rights  within  reasonable  time. 
Therefore,  it  is  indicative  of  the  spirit  of  war  industry  that  the 
ordance  district  claims  boards  found  little  difficulty  in  set- 
tling with  the  subcontractors  on  favorable  terms.  The  prime 
contractors  had  no  such  interest  in  these  terms  as  did  the  Gov- 
ernment, since,  whatever  the  subcontract  settlement  costs  might 
be,  the  Government  would  have  to  pay  them.  The  agents  of 
the  district  boards  readily  persuaded  the  subcontractors,  as  a 
sporting  proposition,  to  surrender  their  prospective  profits 
voluntarily  and  accept  the  profit  of  10  per  cent  on  work 
actually  done,  even  as  the  prime  contractors,  who  had  assumed 
the  chief  risk  in  the  first  place,  had  been  willing  to  do.  The 
efforts  of  the  ordnance  field  agents  in  this  direction  saved  the 
Government  many  millions. 

The  first  complete  claim  received  by  the  Ordnance  Claims 
Board  came  from  the  Detroit  district  on  January  10,  1919. 
The  first  claim  to  go  through  to  final  settlement  by  the  Ord- 
nance Claims  Board  was  passed  on  February  20.  The  district 
claims  boards  sent  the  bulky  and  valuable  settlement  papers  to 
Washington  by  courier  rather  than  entrust  them  to  the  mails. 
When  the  system  settled  into  its  routine  the  Ordnance  Claims 


1 56  DEMOBILIZATION 

Board  passed  upon  the  average  claim  within  a  week  after  its 
arrival  in  Washington.  On  the  average  the  Government  paid 
in  the  settlement  of  ordnance  contractors'  claims  an  amount 
equal  to  about  12  per  cent  of  the  face  value  of  the  uncom- 
pleted portions  of  the  contracts.  The  average  ordnance  con- 
tract entailed  a  government  obligation  somewhere  between 
$100,000  and  $250,000  in  amount,  but  many  were  much 
larger.  The  Marlin-Rockwell  Corporation  of  New  Haven, 
Connecticut,  one  of  the  chief  producers  of  machine  guns  and 
small  arms,  presented  a  claim  for  nearly  $14,000,000.  One 
of  the  largest  war  contracts  was  that  with  the  American  Car  & 
Foundry  Company,  of  a  face  value  of  over  $100,000,000.  In 
contrast,  the  New  York  Ordnance  District  Claims  Board, 
which  settled  that  contract,  settled  another  (a  subcontract)  for 
$1.50.  The  claim  of  the  DuPont  Powder  Company  against  the 
Ordnance  Department  was  for  about  $3,280,000 — this  in 
settlement  of  contracts  with  a  value  of  $50,000,000.  The  New 
York  Air  Brake  Company  presented  to  the  Rochester  Ordnance 
Claims  Board  claims  aggregating  $9,000,000.  The  New  York 
District  board  settled  206  claims  for  $1.00  each,  the  con- 
tractors voluntarily  refraining  from  presenting  any  claims 
above  the  statutory  dollar  which  had  to  be  paid  to  make  the 
settlement  legal. 

Many  were  the  interesting  episodes  which  occurred  during 
the  ordnance  liquidation.  The  St.  Louis  district  was  the  chief 
source  of  black  walnut  timber  secured  during  the  war.  Walnut 
was  used  in  making  gunstocks  and  airplane  propellers.  In  hunt- 
ing for  walnut  in  this  district  we  discovered  that  we  were 
gleaning  where  Germany  had  reaped  before  us.  The  former 
solid  stands  of  walnut  in  this  district  had  been  cleaned  out 
in  recent  years,  much  of  the  timber  having  been  shipped  to 
Germany  via  the  Gulf  ports.  Yet  our  gleaning  was  successful. 
Walnut  trees,  growing  as  individuals  or  in  small  groups,  were 
still  to  be  found  along  the  country  lanes,  in  farm  lots,  at  the 
edges  of  orchards,  and  shading  the  grounds  of  the  farmsteads. 
Nowhere  were  more  than  thirty  trees  in  a  group  discovered. 
Consequently  an  adequate  supply  of  walnut  for  the  muni- 


ORDNANCE  DEMOBILIZATION  157 

tions  plants  depended  upon  a  foot-by-foot  search  of  the  entire 
American  countryside  in  the  walnut  regions.  In  this  work  the 
Government  was  assisted  by  tens  of  thousands  of  volunteers 
aroused  to  the  need  by  the  widespread  publicity.  The  Boy 
Scouts  turned  their  hikes  into  walnut-hunting  expeditions. 
The  country  doctor,  the  circuit-riding  clergyman,  the  bee 
hunter,  and  the  muskrat  trapper  all  made  it  their  business  to 
locate  and  report  stands  of  walnut  timber.  As  a  result  unex- 
pectedly ample  quantities  of  the  wood  were  secured  from 
regions  supposedly  denuded  of  it.  On  the  day  of  the  armistice 
the  timber  dealers  found  themselves  stocked  up  with  enough 
black  walnut  to  meet  all  commercial  demands  for  five  years 
ahead. 

One  of  the  Ordnance  Department's  timber  cruisers  located 
a  grove  of  black  walnut  trees  shading  the  farm  home  of  a 
woman  living  in  Missouri.  She  hated  to  sacrifice  her  trees,  but 
listened  to  the  appeal  of  patriotism  and  accepted  an  offer  of 
$1,100  for  them.  Then,  when  the  agent  had  left  with  her 
signed  agreement  in  his  pocket,  she  repented  of  her  bargain 
and  grieved  so  much  at  her  forthcoming  loss  that  the  village 
minister  suggested  a  remedy.  He  told  her  that  the  anticipated 
proceeds  of  the  sale  would  pay  for  an  automobile  in  which 
she  could  ride  about  the  country  and,  amid  the  pleasant  rural 
scenes,  forget  about  the  devastation  soon  to  be  staged  in  her 
own  front  yard.  She  acted  on  this  suggestion,  bought  a  car 
for  $1,080,  and  in  payment  gave  a  note  which  she  agreed  to 
lift  when  the  Government  took  the  trees  and  paid  her  the 
money.  The  armistice  intervened  before  the  timber  cutters 
appeared,  and  the  Ordnance  Department  canceled  the  con- 
tract with  the  timber  dealer.  That  left  the  woman  with  a  half- 
used  car,  a  note  maturing  in  the  bank  to  meet  which  she  had 
no  funds,  and  a  clump  of  walnut  trees  for  which  the  Govern- 
ment had  no  use.  The  St.  Louis  District  Claims  Board  could 
not  relieve  her  distress,  but  a  member  of  the  board  brought  the 
case  to  the  attention  of  a  meeting  of  war  contractors;  and  it 
was  arranged  for  the  Missouri  lady  to  keep  both  her  automo- 
bile and  her  walnut  trees. 


158  DEMOBILIZATION 

The  New  York  District  Claims  Board  settled  for  $275,000 
the  claim  of  the  Wah  Chang  Trading  Corporation,  of  China, 
which  supplied  a  large  amount  of  antimony  used  in  making 
shrapnel  bullets.  In  the  New  York  district  also  there  had  been 
a  contract  with  the  Japan  Paper  Company  to  supply  paper 
parachutes  for  carrying  floating  signal  lights.  The  contract 
was  not  a  large  one ;  yet  in  its  settlement  it  was  disclosed  that 
there  were  about  10,000  subcontractors — individual  Japanese 
families  working  in  their  own  homes  in  Japan.  Under  the  cir- 
cumstances the  board  waived  the  usual  rule  that  with  every 
prime  contract  claim  must  be  filed  statements  of  settlement 
certified  by  every  subcontractor. 

Each  of  the  district  claims  boards  maintained  in  its  quar- 
ters a  progress  chart  which  showed  graphically  each  day  the 
amount  of  industrial  liquidation  accomplished  and  the  amount 
remaining  to  be  done.  In  eleven  of  the  districts  this  chart  took 
the  form  of  a  thermometer,  the  rising  mercury  showing  the 
amount  of  completed  work.  In  the  twelfth — at  Cleveland — 
the  chart  was  a  representation  of  a  bottle  containing  a  cele- 
brated beverage  that  does  duty  in  these  dry  days  for  beer, 
and  the  task  of  the  board  was  to  empty  this  container. 

On  the  first  anniversary  of  the  armistice  the  Ordnance  De- 
partment's system  of  industrial  demobilization  had  cleared  up 
a  large  part  of  the  war  business.  The  district  boards  had  passed 
upon  94  per  cent  of  all  contractors'  claims  presented,  and  the 
Ordnance  Claims  Board  in  Washington  had  disposed  of  73 
per  cent  of  the  ordnance  claims.  The  settlements  at  this  time 
had  cost  the  United  States  nearly  $131,000,000,  but  that  sum 
had  settled  uncompleted  portions  of  contracts  to  the  value  of 
approximately  $1,000,000,000;  and,  in  finding  the  net  cost  of 
the  liquidation  to  the  United  States,  from  the  sum  paid  out 
in  these  settlements  there  was  still  to  be  subtracted  the  receipts 
from  the  sale  of  materials  taken  over  in  the  settlements.  By 
the  end  of  1919  the  district  boards  had  passed  97  per  cent  of 
all  claims  and  the  Ordnance  Claims  Board  81  per  cent.  By 
that  time  the  total  amount  approved  for  payment  in  adjusting 
the  claims  was  more  than  $166,000,000. 


ORDNANCE  DEMOBILIZATION  159 

In  the  latter  part  of  1919,  however,  a  different  system  of 
settlement  went  into  effect.  By  that  time  about  three-fourths 
of  the  ordnance  claims  had  been  settled,  in  a  spirit  essentially 
of  bargain  and  compromise,  the  Government  yielding  points 
and  the  contractors  yielding  them  in  order  to  reach  swift 
agreements.  Those  who  did  the  bargaining  for  the  Government 
were  for  the  most  part  the  original  members  of  the  district 
organizations,  the  men  who  had  been  in  touch  with  the  indus- 
try from  the  start.  As  the  unfinished  business  diminished  in 
quantity,  however,  the  members  of  the  district  claims  boards 
one  by  one  left  the  government  service  and  returned  to  their 
own  affairs,  until  by  the  autumn  of  1919  the  boards  were 
made  up  largely  of  new  members,  most  of  them  uniformed 
army  officers  who  bore  no  such  intimate  relationship  to  the 
contractors.  Within  the  Government,  too,  there  was  a  grow- 
ing spirit  of  criticism  of  the  bargaining  method  of  settling  the 
contracts,  even  though  the  bargains  had  been  highly  advan- 
tageous to  the  Government.  It  was  felt  that  more  conventional 
methods  should  be  employed.  The  result  was  a  marked  slowing 
down  in  the  rate  of  industrial  demobilization  in  the  Ordnance 
Department. 

It  seems  fitting  here  to  say  a  word  for  the  men  who  manu- 
factured our  ordnance  during  the  war.  The  popular  picture  of 
a  war  contractor  is  that  of  a  man  swollen  with  new  wealth  and 
spending  his  money  in  riotous  extravagances.  This  indictment, 
at  any  rate,  cannot  hold  against  the  ordnance  maker.  Instead 
of  profiting,  the  average  ordnance  contractor  was  glad  enough 
to  get  out  of  the  enterprise  with  a  whole  financial  skin.  Many 
were  not  so  fortunate.  An  impartial  investigation  made  by  the 
Ordnance  Department  over  its  entire  war  manufacturing  field 
showed  that  not  more  than  one  contractor  in  three  or  four, 
when  the  business  was  closed  up,  had  anything  to  show  for  his 
war  experience  except  the  self-satisfying  sense  of  having 
served  his  country. 

In  the  light  of  the  fact  that  so  few  of  them  profited  at  all 
and  so  many  incurred  actual  loss,  it  is  remarkable  that  they 
were  not  more  grasping  in  the  demobilization  settlements ;  but 


i6o  DEMOBILIZATION 

the  eternal  fact  remains  that  they  were  inclined  to  ask  for 
less,  rather  than  more,  than  was  coming  to  them  under  their 
legal  rights.  This  attitude  was  consistent  with  their  whole 
attitude  during  the  war.  In  the  history  of  American  industry 
there  is  no  chapter  more  creditable  to  it  than  that  of  the  atti- 
tude and  accomplishments  of  the  producers  of  ordnance  dur- 
ing the  World  War.  These  men  entered  the  undertaking  with 
a  zeal  unsurpassed  in  any  other  part  of  the  war  organization. 
Working  under  an  urgency  such  as  American  industry  had 
never  before  experienced,  they  accepted  the  handicaps  that 
had  been  placed  upon  the  nation  by  its  own  peace-loving 
traditions  and  worked  together  as  a  unit  to  overcome  the 
handicaps.  They  transformed  their  manufacturing  plants  with 
never  a  thought  for  the  business  they  would  one  day  have  to 
resume.  They  undertook  to  produce,  in  quantities  never  before 
even  projected,  intricate  materials  of  warfare  the  very  names 
of  which  were  unfamiliar  to  them.  Despite  the  mounting  costs 
of  materials  and  labor,  they  managed  to  hammer  down  the 
prices  of  rifles,  machine  guns,  explosives,  shrapnel,  and  other 
important  commodities,  delivering  to  the  Government  not 
only  a  superior  product,  but  a  product  costing  the  Govern- 
ment less  than  other  nations  at  war  paid  for  the  same  things. 
To  accomplish  this  result  they  threw  their  normal  rivalries  on 
the  scrap  heap,  opened  up  their  trade  secrets  to  each  other,  and 
virtually  became  partners  in  the  single  enterprise  of  supplying 
the  American  troops  with  the  best  munitions  which  American 
industry  could  produce. 

As  a  rule,  the  profit-making  war  contractor  was  one  who 
supplied  commodities  essentially  like  those  produced  in  nor- 
mal times.  But  supplies  of  this  sort  were  almost  unknown  in 
the  whole  range  of  ordnance.  The  typical  thing  was  to  find  on 
the  day  of  the  armistice  the  ordnance  plant  which  had  not  yet 
come  into  full  production  under  the  original  contract.  This 
was  because  of  the  difficulties  encountered  in  producing  the 
more  important  items  of  ordnance.  The  months  of  the  war 
had  been  marked  by  the  heavy  expenditure  of  money  in  the 
expansion  of  plants  and  the  development  of  processes,  and 


ORDNANCE  DEMOBILIZATION  161 

the  armistice  cut  off  the  development  before  it  had  reached 
the  profitable  stage. 

The  producers  did  not  attempt  to  recoup  in  the  business 
liquidation  that  followed.  These  sentences  are  not  intended  to 
give  a  clean  bill  of  health  to  the  whole  body  of  ordnance 
producers — some  few  of  them  sought  to  get  more  than  they 
were  morally  entitled  to  get;  some  few,  like  the  country  horse 
trader,  adopted  the  age-old  procedure  of  barter  by  asking  more 
than  they  expected  to  get.  But  where  one  man  held  out  for 
the  last  penny  of  his  rights,  there  could  be  found  half  a  dozen 
others  who  put  in  no  claims  at  all  for  money  to  which  they 
were  justly  entitled.  The  great  steel-producing  industry,  in 
particular,  showed  an  aristocratic  contempt  of  requiring  its 
full  due.  Many  steel  producers  pocketed  their  losses  without 
a  word:  in  fact,  the  Government  settled  a  surprising  number 
of  ordnance  contracts  for  the  statutory  one  dollar  apiece  and 
thus  saved  itself  millions  for  which  it  was  legally  liable.  When 
the  curious  ordnance  officers  asked  some  of  these  contractors 
why  they  did  not  claim  their  full  rights,  they  responded  that 
the  victory  over  Germany  was  compensation  enough  for 
them.  As  one  of  them  expressed  it,  the  achievements  of  the 
American  boys  in  France  had  given  him  his  run  for  his  money. 

In  the  Pittsburg  district  two  steel  producers  had  been  en- 
gaged on  contracts  for  essentially  the  same  sort  of  material 
and  on  about  the  same  scale.  One  was  a  small  concern  which 
had  been  kept  at  its  wits'  end  most  of  the  time  to  finance  its 
war  enterprise.  The  other  was  one  of  the  largest  corporations 
in  the  United  States,  with  ample  financial  resources.  Into  the 
Ordnance  Claims  Board  came  two  claims  terminating  con- 
tracts of  approximately  identical  characteristics.  One  of  the 
claims  was  several  times  larger  than  the  other,  and  naturally 
the  Washington  authorities  questioned  the  larger  claim.  They 
found  that  the  latter  was  a  just  claim  in  every  particular.  The 
discovery  was  made  that  the  smaller  of  the  two  claims  had 
asked  for  an  amount  in  settlement  much  below  what  the  pro- 
ducer was  entitled  to  receive.  The  larger  claim  had  been  sub- 
mitted by  the  producer  whose  finances  could  not  stand  any 


i62  DEMOBILIZATION 

loss;  the  smaller  by  the  great  corporation  referred  to  above. 
Both  were  allowed  in  full. 

Of  the  317  large  ordnance  contracts  in  the  Pittsburg  dis- 
trict, the  Government  settled  149,  involving  a  total  obliga- 
tion of  more  than  $23,000,000,  for  $1.00  each.  In  this  and 
other  districts  thousands  of  subcontractors  forgave  the  prime 
contractors  their  legal  obligations  without  the  transfer  of  a 
penny.  In  the  Philadelphia  district  the  prime  contractors 
cleared  up  thousands  of  their  subcontracts  and  said  nothing 
about  them  in  their  liquidation  claims.  These  instances  of 
generosity  were  discovered  only  when  the  Ordnance  Depart- 
ment checked  up  to  find  out  why  the  final  settlement  costs 
were  so  much  lower  than  the  preliminary  estimate  of  those 
costs,  made  in  the  first  hurried  days  after  the  armistice. 

The  record  of  American  ordnance  production  was  not  a 
flawless  one — it  was  too  large  to  be  that — but  in  view  of  the 
general  attitude  of  the  producers,  it  is  submitted  that  to  have 
participated  in  that  war  industry  was  a  distinguished  honor. 


CHAPTER  XI 
ARTILLERY 

THERE  was  a  great  deal  more  to  the  demobilization  of 
the  war  ordnance  industry  than  the  mere  office  opera- 
tion of  settling  with  the  contractors.  It  included  an 
immense  field  activity  of  utmost  practical  interest  both  to  the 
War  Department  and  to  the  public.  The  armistice  found  the 
United  States  in  a  state  of  industrial  preparation  for  war  that 
would  have  been  unattainable  under  any  other  circumstances. 
The  world  situation  had  forced  us  to  turn  American  industry 
into  a  vast  munitions  plant  which,  at  the  cessation  of  hostili- 
ties, was  just  beginning  to  get  into  production  with  some  of 
the  most  essential  materials  of  warfare.  That  plant  had  been 
acquired  only  at  the  cost  of  heavy  mortgage  (in  the  form  of 
government  war  bonds)  placed  upon  the  future,  and  hence  it 
would  have  been  folly  to  close  out  the  business  entirely  with 
nothing  to  show  for  the  whole  effort  but  debts  and  the  realiza- 
tion that  the  existence  of  the  business  had  had  a  psychological 
effect  in  winning  the  war  and  protecting  the  United  States. 
The  sensible  thing  to  do  was  to  save  out  of  the  dismantling 
of  war  industry  a  material  equipment  which  should  afford 
national  military  insurance  for  years  to  come;  and  that  was 
what  the  Ordnance  Department  did. 

In  building  up  this  equipment  the  Ordnance  Department 
was  confronted  with  the  three  major  questions  of  (i)  what 
quantities  of  materials  to  allow  the  industry  to  go  on  and 
produce  before  closing  down  finally,  (2)  what  to  do  with  the 
buildings  and  machinery  which  the  Government  had  provided 
for  the  enterprise,  and  (3)  what  disposition  to  make  of  sur- 
pluses of  both  materials  and  facilities  beyond  the  Govern- 
ment's future  needs. 


1 64  DEMOBILIZATION 

Artillery  constitutes  the  most  important  of  all  war  sup- 
plies. Upon  the  production  of  artillery  and  its  ammunition 
the  Government  expended  more  money  than  upon  any  other 
single  class  of  materials.  From  a  manufacturing  standpoint,  a 
unit  of  artillery  consists  of  three  principal  parts — the  gun 
tube  itself,  the  recuperator  (or  recoil  mechanism),  and  the 
carriage  with  its  attending  caissons.  Each  of  these  manufac- 
turing phases  called  into  existence  during  1917-1918  huge 
industries.  On  the  day  of  the  armistice  nineteen  mills,  built 
new  from  the  ground  up,  were  turning  out  gun  and  howitzer 
tubes  at  the  rate  of  nearly  800  a  month,  a  figure  that  may  be 
contrasted  with  the  annual  American  production  of  seventy- 
five  guns  before  1917.  Five  great  plants,  built  new  at  a  cost  of 
many  millions,  were  engaged  in  building  recuperators  of 
French  design,  and  other  producers  were  manufacturing 
American-  and  British-type  recoil  mechanisms.  The  carriages, 
limbers,  and  caissons,  being,  after  all,  wheeled  vehicles, 
offered  no  particular  manufacturing  problem,  and  it  was  there- 
fore unnecessary  to  create  a  new  industry  to  produce  them. 
Nevertheless,  the  carriage  contracts  engaged  a  large  section  of 
the  car-  and  truck-building  industries  of  the  United  States. 
Yet,  for  the  reason  that  the  vehicle  builders  could  come 
quickly  into  the  production  of  artillery  carriages,  the  physical 
demobilization  of  this  branch  of  the  industry  offered  little 
difficulty,  the  chief  problems  centering  around  the  termination 
of  the  production  of  gun  tubes  and  recuperators.  These  prob- 
lems involved  questions  of  reserves  to  be  produced  before  the 
industries  were  dissolved  and  the  storage  afterwards  of  the 
manufacturing  facilities  to  give  the  United  States  a  potential 
producing  capacity  that  could  be  quickly  utilized  in  the  event 
of  another  war. 

Several  important  considerations  influenced  the  responses 
to  these  questions.  In  the  first  place  our  whole  artillery  manu- 
facturing project  had  been  aimed  at  the  year  1919,  and  in  the 
interim  the  American  Expeditionary  Forces  purchased  heavy 
quantities  of  artillery  in  France  and  England — in  all,  nearly 
5,500  field  guns  of  the  latest  and  best  designs.  Including  cap- 


w  ^ 


3iC£^- 


Photo  by  Howard  E.  Coffin 

HAVOC  WROUGHT  BY  GERMAN  GUNS  AT  FORT 
NEAR  RHEIMS 


Photo  by  Howard  E.  Coffin 

"WIPERS"  READY  FOR  TOURISTS 


Photo  by  Howard  E.  Coffin 

FRENCH  AND  GERMAN  AIRPLANE  ENGINES  AFTER 
COMBAT 


Photo  by  Hovjard  E.  Coffin 

RUINED  TANKS  NEAR  CAMBRAI 


ARTILLERY  165 

tured  materiel^  the  A.  E.  F.  sent  back  to  the  United  States 
after  the  armistice  about  6,000  guns,  with  their  full  equip- 
ment of  limbers,  caissons,  and  supply  vehicles.  This  in  itself 
was  a  quantity  sufficient  to  arm  a  large  field  force;  and,  on  the 
face  of  it,  this  reserve  seemed  to  make  unnecessary  any  post- 
armistice  production  at  all  from  our  own  ordnance  plants.  As 
a  counterbalance,  however,  there  was  the  industrial  situation. 
The  gun  plants  were  heavy  employers  of  labor.  To  close  them 
all  down  forthwith  might  have  created  a  serious  amount  of 
unemployment,  to  the  detriment  of  the  national  prosperity. 
Then,  too,  it  was  good  business  to  order  the  completion  of 
materiel  almost  complete  on  the  day  of  the  armistice,  and  this 
procedure  was  adopted  as  a  general  policy. 

General  rules  and  policies  could  at  best  serve  the  field  men 
of  the  Ordnance  Department  only  as  rough  guides.  Each  of 
the  nineteen  gun  factories  supplied  its  own  special  problems 
in  demobilization.  The  process  of  closing  down  the  factories 
may  be  shown  by  the  example  of  what  went  on  after  the  armi- 
stice at  the  plant  of  the  Bullard  Engineering  Works  at  Bridge- 
port, Connecticut. 

This  was  a  plant  producing  155-millimeter  guns — the  tubes 
only.  The  155,  a  French  weapon,  was  the  highest-powered 
fieldpiece  used  by  the  A.  E.  F.,  the  railroad  guns  not  being 
considered  to  be  field  guns.  The  supply  of  the  useful  155  was 
never  equal  to  the  demand.  The  French  factories  could  not 
deliver  as  many  as  the  A.  E.  F.  needed;  and,  because  of  the 
difficulty  of  producing  the  recuperator,  our  own  industry  did 
not  succeed  in  turning  out  a  single  completely  assembled  unit 
before  the  armistice,  although  all  parts  had  been  successfully 
produced  ready  for  assembling.  Here,  then,  was  an  important 
class  of  artillery  in  which  a  shortage  existed,  and  therefore 
the  Ordnance  Department  was  liberal  in  allowing  production 
after  the  armistice. 

The  Bullard  Engineering  Works  held  contracts  calling  for 
the  production  of  1,400  155-millimeter  gun  tubes.  On  the  first 
day  of  the  armistice  it  had  delivered  forty-five  finished  tubes, 
and  500  others  were  progressing  through  the  plant  in  various 


i66  DEMOBILIZATION 

stages  of  completion.  Many  of  these  incomplete  units  had  , 
passed  through  the  difficult  shrinking  process.  Guns  are  built 
up  in  layers  of  steel,  each  one  heated,  superimposed  upon  the 
adjoining  one,  and  then  shrunk  on  in  various  cooling  processes, 
thus  putting  into  the  steel  strata  a  compression  that  enables 
the  gun  to  sustain  tremendous  interior  pressures  without  dis- 
tortion. The  ordnance  officers  looked  at  the  status  of  work  at 
the  Bullard  plant  and  ordered  the  completion  of  the  500  units 
in  process,  terminating  the  rest  of  the  great  contract. 

This  action  was  taken  on  the  eleventh  day  of  the  armistice. 
The  company  expected  to  be  able  to  complete  the  remaining 
500  guns  in  six  months,  a  course  that  would  enable  the  manu- 
facture to  taper  off  and  the  gunmakers  to  find  other  employ- 
ment. Two  months  later  it  was  found  that  other  industry  was 
readily  absorbing  the  excess  labor  of  the  gun  plant,  and  there- 
fore another  cut  was  made  in  the  contemplated  production, 
the  number  of  completions  ordered  being  reduced  to  262  in 
number.  These  were  to  be  finished  by  April  15,  1919,  after 
which  war  work  at  the  plant  was  to  cease  entirely. 

Note,  now,  the  measures  adopted  in  terminating  the  work. 
It  is  evident  that  the  post-armistice  operation  was  going  to 
deliver  to  the  Government  262  finished  guns  and  238  unfin- 
ished ones.  The  latter  would  stand  for  a  government  expendi- 
ture of  millions  of  dollars.  As  an  industrial  commodity  these 
unfinished  tubes  would  have  value  only  as  scrap  steel,  to  be 
melted  up  and  made  into  other  things.  Yet  to  the  Government 
they  possessed  a  real  military  value.  In  the  event  of  another 
war  occurring  before  the  present-day  types  of  artillery  become 
obsolete,  the  Army  would  need  not  only  reserves  of  guns  ready 
for  use,  but  also  another  great  gunmaking  industry,  to  pro- 
duce for  an  indefinitely  expanding  field  force.  Therefore 
proper  war  reserves  should  consist  not  only  of  guns,  but  also 
of  reserve  facilities  for  manufacturing  guns — machinery  and 
tools,  designs,  plans,  and  instructions,  and,  especially,  the 
rough  forgings  of  gun  elements,  so  that,  the  moment  a  new 
gun  factory  was  organized  and  equipped,  it  could  start  work- 
ing, without  having  to  wait  weeks  and  months  until  the  raw 


ARTILLERY  167 

materials  came  up  from  the  forging  plants.  The  Bullard 
Works  were  instructed  to  stop  work  on  the  incompleted  units 
at  such  points  as  would  enable  future  gunmakers,  if  necessary, 
to  resume  the  work  without  difficulty.  All  incomplete  units, 
however,  were  to  be  carried  through  the  shrinking  process  be- 
fore being  dropped.  The  various  hoops  and  jackets  which  are 
shrunk  upon  gun  tubes  are  machined  to  a  precision  expressed 
in  thousandths  of  an  inch.  In  heavy  metal  working,  such  exact- 
ness is  ordinarily  unknown.  It  is  evident  that  only  a  little  rust- 
ing would  destroy  the  fit  of  the  contact  surfaces  and  ruin  the 
unassembled  jackets  and  hoops,  and  therefore  the  company 
was  instructed  to  assemble  these  otherwise  perishable  elements 
before  stopping  the  work.  After  the  shrinking,  all  uncompleted 
pieces  were  slushed  in  grease,  packed  for  protection,  and 
stored  away,  to  be  used,  according  to  the  plan,  in  the  manu- 
facture which  will  be  necessary  in  the  peace-time  maintenance 
of  the  artillery  equipment.  Some  of  the  incomplete  Bullard 
tubes  of  the  155's  were  later  transferred  to  the  Watervliet 
Arsenal  and  finished  with  the  machinery  there.  The  arsenal 
completed  300  guns  of  this  size  after  the  armistice. 

This,  essentially,  so  far  as  the  partially  finished  units  were 
concerned,  was  the  procedure  followed  by  the  Ordnance  De- 
partment in  all  nineteen  emergency  gun  plants.  Although  the 
mills  turning  out  rough  forgings  for  the  gun  plants  were  taken 
from  this  branch  of  war  work  immediately  after  the  armistice, 
the  Ordnance  Department  reserved  and  stored  a  supply  of 
forgings  in  order  to  keep  the  future  gun  plants  in  operation 
until  new  forging  mills  can  come  into  production. 

Seventeen  of  the  emergency  gun  plants  were  closed  out 
altogether  after  the  armistice.  Two  remain  among  the  war 
assets  of  the  United  States,  held  "in  ordinary,"  as  the  phrase 
goes,  meaning  that  they  are  closed,  but  ready  with  machinery 
and  materials  in  all  stages  of  completion  to  start  up  in  full 
operation  as  soon  as  the  workmen  can  be  recruited  and  the  fires 
started.  These  two  additions  to  our  arsenal  system  were  named 
the  Rochester  Gun  Plant  and  the  Erie  Howitzer  Plant;  and 
at  these  two  plants  and  at  the  government  arsenals  the  Ord- 


i68  DEMOBILIZATION 

nance  Department  concentrated  the  great  equipment  of  ma- 
chinery, tools,  plans,  and  materials  left  on  its  hands  after  the 
dissolution  of  the  gunmaking  industry  created  by  the  war, 
all  stored  so  systematically  that  the  War  Department,  at  any 
time  for  years  to  come,  can,  in  theory,  at  any  rate,  quickly 
reestablish  a  gun  industry  on  the  scale  known  in  1918.  Recently 
it  has  been  proposed  to  transfer  the  facilities  at  Rochester  to 
some  other  place. 

The  existence  of  this  manufacturing  equipment  in  the  pos- 
session of  the  Ordnance  Department  gives  the  United  States 
a  stronger  military  potentiality  than  the  nation  ever  possessed 
before.  For  the  first  time  in  our  history  the  Government  itself 
during  peace  is  in  possession  of  extensive  facilities  for  the 
manufacture  of  light  and  medium-heavy  artillery.  Before  the 
war  the  Army  procured  all  its  field  guns  (and  those  only  in 
negligible  quantities)  principally  from  private  makers.  Its  two 
gunmaking  arsenals,  Watertown  and  Watervliet,  turned  out 
principally  large  guns  for  fixed  mounting  at  the  coastal  forts. 
Before  showing  what  was  done  at  the  Rochester  and  Erie 
plants,  it  is  worth  while  pausing  to  note  the  legacy  received 
from  the  war  industry  of  1917-1918  by  the  two  established 
gunmaking  arsenals. 

The  Watertown  Arsenal  is  to-day  the  War  Department's 
chief  permanent  establishment  for  the  production  of  gun 
forgings.  Watervliet  is  the  great  gun-finishing  plant.  At  a  cost 
of  many  millions  these  two  institutions  were  built  up  and 
expanded  on  a  vast  scale  during  the  war.  After  the  armistice 
these  two  arsenals  received  the  reserve  supply  of  machinery 
and  materials  used  in  making  the  heavier  field  guns — prin- 
cipally 155-millimeter  guns  and  240-millimeter  howitzers — 
forging  machinery  at  Watertown,  finishing  machinery  at 
Watervliet.  For  the  manufacture  of  lighter  guns,  the  machin- 
ery has  been  stored  principally  at  the  new  Rochester  and  Erie 
plants. 

With  the  new  equipment  installed  at  the  Watervliet  Ar- 
senal during  the  war,  that  institution  reached  a  productive 
capacity  of  sixty  155-millimeter  guns  a  month  and  sixty  240- 


ARTILLERY  169 

millimeter  howitzers.  These  facilities  to-day  are  set  up  and 
ready  for  immediate  operation.  But  in  addition  to  the  arsenal's 
own  proper  plant,  the  Ordnance  Department  has  stored  at 
Watervliet  reserve  machinery  sufficient  to  manufacture  fifty- 
two  155-millimeter  howitzers,  seventeen  4.7-inch  guns,  and 
forty-nine  75-millimeter  guns  every  month.  This  machinery, 
in  the  event  of  another  war,  is  to  be  shipped  to  emergency  war 
plants  and  set  up  in  them.  Besides  this,  all  the  war-time  equip- 
ment for  producing  anti-aircraft  guns  has  been  stored  at 
Watervliet.  One  of  the  later  inventive  developments  of  the 
World  War  was  to  increase  the  power  of  the  already  powerful 
155-millimeter  gun  by  increasing  its  caliber  to  194  millimeters 
and  adding  to  its  length,  making  an  entirely  new  weapon,  but 
one  of  the  same  type  as  the  155.  None  of  these  guns  was 
actually  built  during  the  war,  but  machinery  able  to  produce 
twenty  of  them  every  month  is  included  within  the  equipment 
at  Watervliet,  one-third  of  this  machinery  set  up  and  needing 
only  slight  rearrangement  and  modification  to  be  ready  for 
immediate  operation. 

All  this  equipment  at  Watervliet  for  the  production  of 
medium-weight  field  guns  is  idle  and  probably  will  remain  so 
as  long  as  the  great  reserve  of  finished  artillery  accumulated 
during  the  war  continues  to  have  military  value.  Unless 
another  great  war  comes  to  upset  the  plans,  the  only  produc- 
tion of  light  field  artillery  in  this  country  for  many  years 
henceforth  will  be  that  resulting  from  the  operation  of  a  small 
experimental  gun  plant  at  Watervliet,  to  be  maintained  in 
operation  to  the  sole  end  that  the  United  States  may  keep 
pace  with  the  progress  of  artillery  manufacture.  Whenever 
improvements  are  devised,  the  necessary  changes  will,  if  Con- 
gress provides  the  funds  and  present  ambitions  are  realized, 
be  made  in  the  reserve  machinery  to  enable  it  to  turn  out  the 
improved  models  from  the  start  of  operation. 

Meanwhile  Watervliet  and  Watertown  will  continue  to  be 
what  they  were  before  1917 — the  main  reliance  of  the  Army 
for  its  guns  of  the  largest  calibers  for  use  at  the  coastal  forts 
and  on  railway  mounts.  At  best,  the  production  of  such  weap- 


1 70  DEMOBILIZATION 

ons  is  a  slow  and  intricate  process,  and  the  only  way  to  procure 
a  supply  of  them  is  to  keep  producing  them  all  the  time. 
Watertown  makes  the  forgings  for  these  guns,  and  Watervliet, 
with  its  own  great  equipment  augmented  by  machinery  from 
the  dismantled  war  plants,  can  now  manufacture  guns  up  to 
16  inches  in  caliber  and  howitzers  from  12  to  16  inches.  At 
Watervliet,  too,  has  been  stored  some  of  the  machinery  from 
the  American  Ordnance  Base  Depot  in  France  for  relining  big 
guns  and  restoring  them  to  use. 

Now  let  us  look  at  the  two  chief  auxiliaries  to  the  two  gun- 
making  arsenals,  the  Rochester  Gun  Plant  and  the  Erie 
Howitzer  Plant,  which  are  now  "stand-by"  factories  for  the 
production  of  field  artillery  of  the  smaller  sizes — 75-milli- 
meter and  4.7-inch  guns  and  155-millimeter  howitzers.  The 
Rochester  Gun  Plant,  with  its  own  war  tools  and  with  the 
equipment  concentrated  there  during  the  demobilization,  is 
now  equipped  to  turn  out  360  75-millimeter  guns  every  month. 
Its  equipment  includes  not  only  the  elaborate  finishing  ma- 
chinery, but  also  a  shop  capable  of  heat-treating  and  rough- 
machining  200  sets  of  black  forgings  for  the  gun  every  month. 
This  plant  alone  can  produce  75's  to  keep  pace  with  the  needs 
of  a  great  army,  including  its  battle  wastage,  until  a  new  gun 
industry  can  come  into  existence.  All  the  buildings  are  new 
steel  and  concrete  structures.  The  plant  was  built  on  twelve 
and  a  half  acres  of  ground  at  Rochester  during  the  war  by  the 
Symington-Anderson  Company  for  the  Government.  This  site 
is  now  leased  by  the  Government.  Its  purchase  would  guaran- 
tee the  continued  existence  of  this  important  military  asset. 

The  Rochester  plant  is  held  entirely  in  ordinary:  machinery- 
slushed  in  grease  and  boxed,  and  materials  at  hand  in  every 
department  ready  for  machining,  but  watchmen  the  only  occu- 
pants of  the  buildings.  Not  the  least  important  part  of  the 
plant's  equipment  is  a  book  containing  a  detailed  mechanical 
description  of  every  one  of  the  521  manufacturing  operations 
in  the  production  of  a  75-millimeter  gun,  and  including  even 
a  chart  showing  the  correct  organization  of  the  working  forces 
at  the  plant.  Even  such  complete  plans,  however,  cannot  be 


ARTILLERY  171 

made  to  include  the  small  kinks  and  short  cuts  of  shop  prac- 
tice, which  must  be  developed  and  learned  by  actual  expe- 
rience at  the  machines.  Any  future  force  of  plant  operatives, 
therefore,  would  have  to  learn  the  obscure  secrets  of  manu- 
facture before  the  plant  could  reach  great  efficiency. 

At  the  Erie  Howitzer  Plant  a  similar  procedure  was  fol- 
lowed. Here,  on  eleven  acres  of  what  had  been  vacant  ground 
in  August,  1917,  the  American  Brake  Shoe  &  Foundry  Com- 
pany six  months  later  turned  out  finished  155-millimeter 
howitzers  and  reached  a  productive  capacity  of  twelve  how- 
itzers daily  before  the  armistice.  The  plant  stands  to-day  as  a 
complete  gun  factory,  although  all  its  equipment  is  greased 
and  housed  up,  and  its  bays  echo  only  to  the  steps  of  watch- 
men. While  it  was  selected  chiefly  to  be  the  stand-by  plant  for 
the  production  of  155-millimeter  howitzers,  at  the  shop  has 
been  concentrated  the  machinery  and  tooling  used  by  the 
Northwestern  Ordnance  Company  to  produce  4.7-inch  guns 
at  its  war  plant  at  Madison,  Wisconsin.  This  machinery  had 
a  capacity  of  four  such  guns  daily.  The  howitzer  shop  and  the 
gun  shop  occupy  separate  buildings.  In  the  third  building  has 
been  installed  machinery  for  producing  shell  for  155-milli- 
meter guns. 

The  machinery  set  up  at  Erie  is  designed  to  allow  for 
increases  in  the  powers  of  the  two  weapons  to  be  made  there. 
The  howitzer  can  be  increased  in  length  (thereby  increasing 
its  range),  and  the  4.7-inch  gun  can  be  increased  to  5  inches 
in  caliber,  without  requiring  fundamental  changes  in  the 
machinery. 

The  present  industrial  position  of  the  United  States  with 
respect  to  the  manufacture  of  mobile  field  artillery  may  be 
seen  in  the  following  tabular  summing  up  of  the  preceding 
paragraphs : 


1 72  DEMOBILIZATION 


Place  of 

Monthly  Production 

Manufacture 

Type  of  Weapon 

Capacity 

Rochester  Gun  Plant 

75-millimeter  gun 

360 

Watervliet  Arsenal 

75-millimeter  gun 

49 

Erie  Howitzer  Plant 

4.7-inch  gun 

100 

Watervliet  Arsenal 

4.7-inch  gun 

17 

Erie  Howitzer  Plant 

155-millimeter  howitzer 

200 

Watervliet  Arsenal 

155-millimeter  howitzer 

52 

Watervliet  Arsenal 

155-millimeter  gun 

60 

Watervliet  Arsenal 

240-millimetcr  howitzer 

60 

Total 

monthly  gunmaking  capacity 

898 

These  fine  weapons,  all  but  one  of  which  were  designed  by 
the  French,  the  builders  of  the  finest  field  artillery  known,  and 
manufactured  only  in  France  before  the  war,  would  be  useless 
without  recuperators,  the  recoil-absorbing  mechanisms  which 
make  modem  quick  firing  possible.  Along  with  the  guns  there 
came  to  us  the  designs  for  the  four  French  hydropneumatic 
recuperators.  The  French  hesitated  in  the  beginning  about 
giving  us  their  recuperator  plans — not  because  they  did  not 
desire  us  to  have  the  best  in  artillery,  but  because  they  thought, 
with  much  justification,  that  we  should  never  be  able  to  build 
them  in  time  to  be  of  service  in  the  World  War,  although  it 
was  possible  that  after  the  war,  by  long  and  determined  effort, 
we  might  be  able  to  train  mechanics  who  could  make  them. 
Only  the  sudden  termination  of  the  war,  however,  kept 
American-built  French  recuperators  from  serving  at  the  front, 
for  every  one  was  successfully  produced  in  this  country  before 
the  armistice,  including  a  single  specimen  of  the  perplexing 
75-millimeter  recuperator.  Three  immense,  specially  equipped 
plants  and  two  government  arsenals  produced  them. 

Millions  of  dollars  were  spent  in  preparing  to  build  French 
recuperators.  The  Singer  Manufacturing  Company  built  a 
great  plant  at  Elizabethport,  New  Jersey,  to  make  75-milli- 
meter recuperators.  The  Rock  Island  Arsenal  equipped  a  new 
department  to  build  this  same  mechanism.  Dodge  Brothers 
spent  $11,000,000  on  an  immense  plant  at  Detroit  for  the 
manufacture  of  the  recuperators  for  155-millimeter  guns  and 


ARTILLERY  173 

howitzers,  separate  designs,  and  separate  manufacturing  propo- 
sitions. The  fourth  type,  the  240,  was  put  in  production  at  a 
plant  equipped  for  the  purpose  at  Chicago  by  the  Otis  Eleva- 
tor Company.  Only  one  of  the  mechanisms,  the  155-millimeter 
howitzer  recuperator,  reached  the  stage  of  quantity  production 
before  the  armistice.  For  the  millions  spent  on  the  others  the 
Government  had  only  the  experience  and  a  quantity  of  forg- 
ings  and  semi-finished  recuperators  possessing  only  scrap  value 
as  they  existed  on  the  day  of  the  armistice.  Therefore  the 
Ordnance  Department  did  not  stop  this  vital  production  at 
once  after  the  armistice. 

The  Singer  Company  was  working  on  orders  for  2,500  75- 
millimeter  recuperators.  Although  it  had  not  succeeded  in 
turning  out  a  single  acceptable  recuperator  by  November  11, 
1918,  its  processes  had  been  refined  almost  to  the  point  where 
they  could  begin  producing  these  beautiful  pieces  of  metallic 
sculpture  in  quantity.  The  Willys-Overland  Company  had 
built  about  300  carriages  for  the  French  75  by  the  date  of  the 
armistice,  and  it  was  decided  to  allow  the  Singer  Company  to 
build  recuperators  for  these  carriages  and  an  additional  450 
as  a  reserve.  Considerations  of  economy  later  held  the  Singer 
Company  to  a  total  production  of  247  recuperators,  resulting 
in  a  shortage  as  compared  with  the  carriages. 

Meanwhile,  be  it  remembered,  the  Rock  Island  Arsenal  was 
working  on  75-millimeter  recuperators.  It  was  decided  to 
retain  the  recuperator  department  as  an  active  branch  of  the 
arsenal.  The  arsenal  was  a  little  ahead  of  the  Singer  Company 
in  the  development,  for  it  had  actually  produced  an  acceptable 
recuperator  before  the  armistice;  and  it  had  542  others  in 
process  in  the  shop.  The  arsenal's  production  proper  was  there- 
fore limited  to  this  number,  but  the  incomplete  units  from 
Elizabethport  were  later  transferred  to  Rock  Island,  and  the 
arsenal  eventually  completed  ^^^  75-millimeter  recuperators 
before  closing  down  the  department.  These  were  pronounced 
to  be  in  every  way  the  equal  of  the  French  product. 

The  War  Department  provided  no  arsenal  facilities  for  the 
production  of  recuperators  for  the   155-millimeter  guns  and 


1 74  DEMOBILIZATION 

howitzers,  but  centered  its  entire  program  for  both  mechanisms 
in  the  Dodge  plant  at  Detroit.  After  the  armistice  it  was  first 
decided  to  retain  the  Dodge  factory  as  a  stand-by  recuperator 
plant.  All  machinery  and  materials  were  protected  against 
deterioration,  and  the  plant,  under  guard,  was  added  to  the 
arsenal  system,  ranking  as  a  subsidiary  to  the  Rock  Island 
Arsenal.  Later  the  Dodge  plant  was  sold,  and  nearly  half  of 
its  machinery  was  moved  to  Rock  Island. 

The  plan  of  artillery  demobilization  and  industrial  pre- 
paredness in  this  direction  is  now  evident.  Watertown  Arsenal 
is  the  development  center  for  the  raw  materials  of  artillery 
manufacture.  Watervliet  Arsenal,  with  its  stand-by  plants  at 
Rochester  and  Erie,  is  the  gun-producing  center.  Rock  Island 
Arsenal  is  the  center  for  gun  carriages  and  recuperators. 

One  exception  to  this  scheme  is  to  be  noted.  The  war-time 
producers  of  the  240-millimeter  recuperators  were  two — the 
Otis  Elevator  Company  at  Chicago  and  the  Watertown  Ar- 
senal. The  Otis  plant,  originally  having  orders  for  1,000 
recuperators,  was  ordered  to  finish  250  of  them  after  the  armi- 
stice. Thereafter  some  of  its  machinery  was  transferred  and 
stored  at  the  Watertown  Arsenal,  which  thus  remains  as  the 
manufacturing  center  for  this  heavy  mechanism. 

There  was  no  need  for  the  Ordnance  Department  during 
the  demobilization  to  exercise  so  much  care  looking  to  the 
future  production  of  artillery  carriages,  and  for  the  reason 
mentioned,  that  the  manufacture  of  carriages  was  easier  than 
the  manufacture  of  guns  and  recuperators.  Carriages  can  be 
produced  with  machinery  essentially  the  same  as  that  used  in 
making  motor  trucks,  street  cars,  and  other  heavy  vehicles. 
Consequently,  the  War  Department  contented  itself  with  re- 
serving enough  machinery  to  equip  at  Rock  Island  Arsenal 
a  model  carriage-building  department  large  enough  to  main- 
tain the  existing  reserves  of  artillery  and  to  experiment  with 
new  designs.  This  plant  can  now  manufacture  every  month 
one  hundred  carriages  for  the  lighter  field  artillery — for  the 
75's,  the  4.7's,  and  the  155's,  both  howitzers  and  guns.  In 
addition,  at  Rock  Island  have  been  concentrated  jigs,  fixtures, 


ARTILLERY  175 

gauges,  and  special  tools  used  by  the  war  factories,  this  equip- 
ment being  boxed,  catalogued,  and  ready  for  instant  ship- 
ment to  commercial  factories  that  may  be  called  upon  to  build 
artillery  carriages  in  a  hurry.  No  machine  tools  used  in  car- 
riage building,  however,  have  been  retained. 

The  same  economic,  military,  and  business  reasons  that  influ- 
enced the  post-armistice  production  of  guns  and  recuperators, 
controlled  also  the  closing  down  of  the  carriage  plants.  There 
was  a  considerable  production  of  field  artillery  carriages  after 
the  immediate  military  need  for  them  had  passed. 

The  artillery  war  orders  called  for  the  production  of  about 
20,000  complete  units,  a  unit  being  a  gun,  recuperator,  car- 
riage, and  accompanying  limbers  and  caissons.  The  total  pro- 
duction attributable  to  the  war  was  6,663  complete  units, 
produced  about  half  before  the  armistice  and  half  afterwards. 
The  value  of  this  materiel^  together  with  the  semi-Jfinished 
components  retained,  was  about  $300,000,000. 

After  the  armistice  the  General  Staff  adopted  the  policy  that 
in  the  demobilization  sufficient  mobile  field  artillery  should 
be  retained  to  equip  an  army  of  twenty  divisions — 800,000 
men — with  reserves  to  take  care  of  battle  wastage  over  a 
period  of  six  months,  during  which  interval  a  new  artillery 
industry  would  be  brought  into  existence.  It  is  interesting  to 
note  how  completely  the  Ordnance  Department  met  this 
policy.  Including  the  6,000  field  guns  brought  back  by  the 
American  Expeditionary  Forces  (this  figure  not  including 
captured  materiel),  the  Army  now  has  an  equipment  of  about 
10,000  artillery  units.*  The  staff  plan  indicates  2,583  as  the 
proper  number  of  75-millimeter  guns  to  be  in  reserve:  the 
Army  actually  possesses  6,000.  The  projected  army  of  twenty 
divisions  needs  986  155-millimeter  howitzers:  the  War  De- 
partment owns  2,171.  The  projected  force  should  have  976 
155-millimeter  guns:  the  Army  to-day  owns  993.  These  liberal 
margins  obtain  throughout  the  range  of  mobile  field  guns. 

*  The  A.  E.  F.  importations  include  all  American-made  guns  shipped  to 
France,  these  same  guns  also  being  included  among  the  6,663  units  noted  as 
built  in  the  United  States. 


1 76  DEMOBILIZATION 

On  the  theory  (and  it  is  a  correct  theory)  that  all  the 
money  put  into  artillery  before  the  armistice  should  be  charged 
off  as  part  of  the  cost  of  victory,  the  post-armistice  production 
of  field  artillery  was  a  prudent  transaction  for  the  War  De- 
partment. By  spending  $6,000,000  on  the  completion  of  75- 
millimeter  7natcricl  after  the  armistice,  the  Government  ob- 
tained property  worth  over  $14,500,000.  By  spending 
$1 1,000,000  in  the  155-millimeter  gun  project  after  the  armi- 
stice, the  Government  secured  artillery  worth  $18,000,000.  By 
spending  $9,000,000  for  155-millimeter  howitzers  after  the 
armistice,  the  Government  obtained  inateriel  valued  at 
$15,000,000. 

The  storage  of  the  vast  reserves  of  field  artillery  presented 
a  special  problem  to  the  Ordnance  Department  after  the  armi- 
stice. Not  only  the  guns  themselves,  but  also  the  accessory 
vehicles,  had  to  be  stored,  and  the  latter  outnumbered  the 
guns  several  times.  For  example,  the  American  factories  built 
18,000  caissons  and  20,000  caisson  limbers  for  75-millimeter 
guns  alone,  and  accessory  vehicles  in  like  proportions  were 
brought  back  from  France  by  the  A.  E.  F.  It  required  about 
5,000,000  square  feet  of  storage  space  to  house  all  the  mate- 
riel. The  Rock  Island  Arsenal  was  selected  as  the  storage 
center  for  field  artiller}%  augmented  by  storage  facilities 
created  at  the  Savanna  Proving  Ground  in  Illinois,  the  Erie 
Proving  Ground  in  Ohio,  and  the  Aberdeen  Proving  Ground 
in  Maryland.  Some  of  the  artillery  was  stored  at  Raritan 
Arsenal  in  New  Jersey  and  at  Fort  D.  A.  Russell  in  Wyoming. 
For  storing  the  artillery  the  Ordnance  Department  used  brick 
warehouses  and  also  portable  steel  storehouses  built  originally 
to  protect  the  reserve  American  artillery  in  France.  The  Ord- 
nance Department  retained  a  complete  engineering  collection 
of  the  captured  enemy  artillery,  one  example  of  every  type, 
and  this  has  been  set  up  as  an  exhibit  at  Aberdeen.  The  collec- 
tion includes  a  complete  unit  of  the  famous  German  42- 
centimeter  howitzer  used  against  the  fortifications  of  Liege 
and  Verdun. 

In  demobilizing  the  industry  which  was  producing  our  rail- 


ARTILLERY  177 

way  artillery,  the  Ordnance  Department  again  availed  itself 
of  the  opportunity  to  provide  for  the  future  defense  of  the 
United  States;  and  in  this  branch  of  war  industry,  too,  we 
find  the  same  tapering-off  process  after  the  armistice,  the  com- 
pletion of  some  materials  which  were  nearing  completion  at 
the  time  of  the  armistice,  and  the  retention  of  machinery  to 
provide  for  a  possible  future  industry.  As  a  result  of  these 
measures,  the  Atlantic  seaboard  is  now  defended  by  a  system 
of  powerful  guns  mounted  on  railway  cars  and  capable  of 
being  moved  on  the  regular  railroad  tracks,  supplemented  by 
new  tracks  laid  both  during  and  since  the  war  by  the  Coast 
Artillery  Corps,  to  any  point  which  may  be  in  need  of  defense. 
Before  1917  all  our  coast-defense  guns  were  mounted  on  fixed 
emplacements  at  the  forts.  Camp  Abraham  Eustis,  which 
sprang  into  existence  during  the  war  as  the  embarkation  camp 
for  artillery  at  Newport  News,  has  been  turned  over  perma- 
nently to  the  Coast  Artillery  Corps  and  is  now  the  headquar- 
ters for  the  Coast  Artillery  Railway  Brigade.  Fortunately  the 
railway  units  nearest  completion  on  the  day  of  the  armistice 
were  those  best  suited  for  use  along  the  seacoast. 

The  project  to  build  railway  artillery,  it  should  be  under- 
stood, was  one  of  producing  mounts  for  guns  most  of  which 
were  already  in  existence.  These  guns  came  principally  from 
the  fixed  mounts  in  the  coastal  defenses,  but  some  of  them 
from  the  Navy  and  other  sources.  The  guns  ranged  in  size 
from  the  7-inch  rifles,  procured  from  the  Navy,  to  16-inch 
howitzers,  one  of  which  had  been  built  experimentally  by  the 
Ordnance  Department  before  1917.  Two  or  three  of  the  rail- 
way projects — such  as  that  of  the  7-inch  navy  guns  and  that  of 
the  three  12-inch  guns  originally  manufactured  for  Chile,  but 
commandeered  at  the  gun  plant  by  the  United  States — were 
complete  on  the  day  of  the  armistice.  When  the  Ordnance 
Department  faced  the  task  of  terminating  the  industry,  there 
were  eight  incomplete  projects  in  railway  artillery.  Two  were 
canceled  outright;  in  three  others  partial  production  after  the 
armistice  was  permitted;  and  the  final  three  were  carried 
through  completely. 


1 78  DEMOBILIZATION 

One  of  the  projects  completed  after  the  armistice  was  that 
providing  for  railway  mounts  for  forty-seven  8-inch,  35  cali- 
bers, seacoast  rifles.  The  two  contractors — the  Morgan  Engi- 
neering Company  of  Alliance,  Ohio,  and  the  Harrisburg 
Manufacturing  &  Boiler  Company  of  Harrisburg,  Pennsyl- 
vania— had  built  eighteen  complete  units,  each  consisting  of 
a  gun  car  and  numerous  accessory  ammunition  and  repair  cars, 
a  whole  train  in  itself,  and  had  manufactured  all  the  parts 
for  the  rest.  These  parts  were  ordered  assembled.  This  purely 
American  mount  possesses  the  advantage  of  permitting  the 
gun  to  fire  at  any  angle,  the  mount  revolving  upon  a  barbette 
carriage,  and  the  disadvantage  that  in  traveling  on  narrow- 
gauge  track  (such  as  is  being  laid  at  isolated  places  along  the 
coast)  its  gun  must  be  transferred  to  a  special  gun  car — a 
transfer,  however,  quickly  effected  by  the  machinery  which 
the  gun  train  itself  carries.  Seventy-seven  ammunition  cars 
for  these  guns,  built  as  they  were  for  operation  in  French  rail- 
way trains  and  therefore  useless  in  this  country,  were  sold  to 
the  French  Government  for  about  $250,000,  a  price  which 
covered  every  cent  spent  in  their  production. 

A  second  project  completed  after  the  armistice  placed 
twelve  12-inch  guns  on  French  Batignolle  railway  mounts. 
This  mount  absorbs  the  gun  recoil  in  an  enormous  hydropneu- 
matic  recuperator,  permitting  rapid  fire  and  the  fastening  of 
the  gun  car  to  the  track  to  avoid  any  retrograde  movement. 
(Several  of  the  railway  mounts  slid  backward  and  had  to  be 
restored  to  aim  after  each  shot. )  The  1 2-inch  mount,  however, 
permits  only  a  small  traverse  swing  to  the  gun,  which,  for 
correct  aiming,  has,  therefore,  to  run  upon  curved  tracks,  or 
epis,  as  they  are  called.  These  mounts  were  built  by  the  Marion 
Steam  Shovel  Company  with  machinery  partly  the  property 
of  the  Government.  At  the  completion  of  the  work  this 
machinery  was  shipped  to  the  Watertown  Arsenal. 

The  final  completed  project  was  the  mounting  of  ninety 
12-inch  mortars  (seacoast  weapons)  upon  railway  cars.  The 
Morgan  Engineering  Company  built  a  special  plant  costing 
$3,500,000  for  this  one  job,  providing  mount-building  capac- 


ARTILLERY  179 

ity  twelve  times  that  of  the  Watertown  Arsenal  before  1917 
— and  that  arsenal  had  been  the  Army's  sole  source  of  big- 
gun  mounts.  On  November  11,  1918,  this  plant  had  manufac- 
tured all  the  parts  for  all  ninety  mounts,  and  the  assembling 
of  these  mounts  was  therefore  ordered.  About  100  ammuni- 
tion cars  of  French  design  were  sold  to  the  French  Govern- 
ment for  about  $350,000,  thus  returning  most  of  the  money 
put  into  them.  The  Alliance  plant  itself  was  too  large  and 
expensive  to  maintain  as  a  stand-by  plant ;  and,  after  shipping 
most  of  the  special-purpose  machinery  to  the  Watertown  Ar- 
senal, the  Ordnance  Department  disposed  of  the  building  to 
a  private  buyer.* 

The  armistice  cut  short  the  joint  Franco- American  project 
to  mount  thirty-six  American  seacoast  10-inch  guns  upon  the 
Schneider  railway  mount,  a  French  design,  America  to  produce 
the  parts  for  the  mounts  and  France  to  assemble  them.  Four 
complete  sets  of  parts  had  been  sent  to  France  before  the 
armistice.  The  contractors  were  three:  the  Harrisburg  Manu- 
facturing &  Boiler  Company  (mounts),  the  Pullman  Car 
Company  (trucks  for  the  gun  cars),  and  the  American  Car 
&  Foundry  Company  (ammunition  cars).  The  weapon  is  not 
ideal  for  coastal  defense,  because  the  mount  allows  no  traverse 
aiming,  and  the  car  therefore  must  be  used  on  curved  track. 
The  contractors  were  permitted  to  finish  eighteen  of  these 
mounts  in  all. 

A  gigantic  piece  of  ordnance  was  the  16-inch  howitzer 
mounted  on  a  railway  truck  during  the  war.  In  a  project  to 
build  sixty-one  such  weapons  by  the  year  1920  the  Govern- 
ment spent  $6,000,000  on  a  special  plant  at  the  mill  of  the 
Mid  vale  Steel  Company  near  Philadelphia.  The  whole  project 
was  abandoned  after  the  armistice,  but  one  building  had  been 
erected  and  the  structural  steel  for  the  rest  of  the  plant  was 
on  the  ground.  Meanwhile  the  toolmakers  of  the  country  were 
working  on  the  vast  projected  manufacturing  equipment  for 

*  This  and  other  special  artillery  plants  since  sold  to  private  buyers  are 
regarded  as  military  assets.  In  the  event  of  another  great  war  they  would 
undoubtedly  be  used  once  more  for  the  work  their  walls  encompassed  in  1918. 


i8o  DEMOBILIZATION 

this  plant;  and  a  small  amount  of  this  machinery  was  com- 
pleted after  the  armistice  and  sent  to  Watervliet  and  Water- 
town  arsenals. 

The  Neville  Island  Gun  Plant  was  projected  in  1918  as  a 
source  of  supply  for  guns  of  the  largest  size  for  mounting 
upon  railway  cars.  The  plant,  which  was  to  cost  $150,000,000, 
a  sum  which  would  have  made  it  by  far  the  largest  gun  plant 
in  the  world,  was  expected  to  manufacture  over  450  guns  of 
the  biggest  sizes  during  1919  and  1920 — more  railway  guns 
than  the  Germans  owned  altogether.  The  enterprise,  which 
was  entirely  abandoned  after  the  armistice,  cost  the  Govern- 
ment about  $9,000,000.  Every  ordnance  officer,  however,  be- 
lieves that  the  mere  project,  actively  started,  had  its  effect  in 
ending  the  war  by  depressing  the  enemy  morale.  The  war  cost 
us  about  $50,000,000  a  day.  If,  therefore,  the  Neville  project 
shortened  the  war  by  as  much  as  three  days,  it  wrote  off  its 
entire  estimated  cost. 

The  project,  immature  though  it  was  when  terminated, 
placed  in  the  war  reserves  certain  steel-working  machinery  of 
the  heaviest  sort.  One  6,500-ton  forging  press,  costing  $500,- 
000,  was  completed  and  turned  over  to  the  Navy  Department 
for  installation  in  the  navy  gun-forging  plant  at  Charleston, 
West  Virginia.  Certain  costly  shell-making  machinery  was 
completed  after  the  armistice  and  either  sold  to  private 
buyers  (at  favorable  prices,  as  compared  with  what  the  Ord- 
nance Department  could  have  obtained  for  the  unfinished 
machines)  or  else  stored  at  the  Watertown  Arsenal. 

Watertown  has  thus  become  the  producing  center  for  rail- 
way artillery  of  the  future.  The  liquidation  of  war  industry 
enormously  expanded  that  institution.  Before  1917  the  gov- 
ernment investment  in  the  Watertown  Arsenal  was  less  than 
$4,000,000.  After  the  concentration  there  of  the  special- 
purpose  gunmaking  machinery  acquired  by  the  Government 
during  the  war,  the  arsenal  was  worth,  at  a  conservative 
valuation,  $20,000,000. 


CHAPTER  XII 
AMMUNITION  AND  OTHER  ORDNANCE 

THE  armistice  found  in  the  United  States  an  enormous 
industry  devoted  to  the  production  of  ammunition  for 
the  artillery.  Including  its  powder-making  plants  and 
its  plants  for  the  production  of  the  raw  materials  of  powder, 
its  scores  of  shell-making  factories,  and  its  loading  establish- 
ments, this  industry  overshadowed,  in  money  invested  and 
operatives  employed,  even  the  artillery-manufacturing  proj- 
ect. The  demobilization  of  this  vast  enterprise,  therefore, 
afforded  the  Ordnance  Department  one  of  its  major  problems 
after  the  armistice. 

The  production  of  powders,  both  high-explosive  and  pro- 
pellant,  in  which  about  70,000  persons  were  engaged  at  the 
time  of  the  armistice,  was  terminated  in  a  remarkably  brief 
time.  When  the  armistice  was  six  weeks  old  all  manufacture 
of  high  explosives  on  war  contracts  had  ceased,  and  two  weeks 
after  that  the  last  of  the  war-time  propellant  (smokeless) 
powder  was  made.  This  termination  left  on  the  hands  of  the 
Ordnance  Department  a  considerable  amount  of  special-pur- 
pose machinery  which  had  little  or  no  market  value.  This 
machinery  was  therefore  retained  and  stored  at  various  ar- 
senals, particularly  at  the  Frankford  and  Picatinny  arsenals, 
the  permanent  army  ammunition  production  centers. 

For  a  while  the  Old  Hickory  Powder  Plant  at  Nashville, 
Tennessee, — its  daily  capacity  of  900,000  pounds  of  smokeless 
powder  making  it  the  largest  powder  factory  in  the  world, — 
was  retained  as  a  stand-by  plant,  but  later  it  was  sold.  The 
Nitro  (West  Virginia)  Powder  Plant,  another  government 
institution  nearly  as  large  as  Old  Hickory,  was  sold  after  the 
armistice,  with  the  result  that  a  new  industrial  city  is  devel- 


i82  DEMOBILIZATION 

oping  on  its  site.  The  War  Department's  enormous  ammonium 
nitrate  plant  at  Perry ville,  Maryland  (ammonium  nitrate 
being  used  in  the  manufacture  of  the  widely  used  war  explo- 
sive amatol),  the  equipment  of  which  included  several  hun- 
dred model  dwellings,  was,  after  the  armistice,  turned  over  to 
the  Public  Health  Service  to  be  used  as  a  hospital  for  ex- 
service  men.  The  three  government  picric  acid  plants — at 
Little  Rock,  Arkansas,  Grand  Rapids,  Michigan,  and  Savan- 
nah, Georgia — were  sold.  Briggs  &  Turivas,  Chicago  steel 
manufacturers,  bought  the  plant  built  by  the  Government  at 
Senter,  Michigan,  for  the  production  of  tetryl,  an  explosive 
used  as  the  charge  in  boosters  in  high-explosive  shell.  The 
Ordnance  Department  also  closed  out  and  sold  the  facilities 
provided  at  Bound  Brook,  New  Jersey,  for  the  production  of 
tetranitroaniline,  another  booster  charge. 

In  general,  plants  and  machinery  used  in  making  powder 
could  be  used  also  to  some  extent  to  make  the  commodities  of 
peaceful  commerce,  and  therefore  the  Ordnance  Department 
had  little  difficulty  in  disposing  of  these  surplus  facilities  at 
good  prices.  The  powder-making  facilities  created  during  the 
war  by  the  DuPont  Powder  Company  near  Wilmington,  for 
instance,  almost  at  once  after  the  armistice  turned  to  the 
manufacture  of  dyestuffs.  Another  war  powder  plant,  with 
practically  the  same  machinery,  is  to-day  producing  artificial 
silk,  a  cellulose  commodity  similar  in  chemical  composition  to 
smokeless  powder.  A  third  is  making  celluloid  and  artificial 
ivory;  a  fourth,  paper. 

Since  trinitrotoluol  (T.  N.  T.)  was  the  most  widely  used 
of  all  war  explosives,  the  Ordnance  Department  was  forced 
to  go  into  the  production  of  the  basic  toluol  itself  as  well  as 
into  the  manufacture  of  its  nitrated  compound.  One  war 
source  of  toluol  was  coal  gas,  and  to  secure  the  chemical  from 
this  source  the  Ordnance  Department  set  up  stripping  plants 
in  the  gas  works  of  thirteen  American  cities.  Nine  of  the  gas 
companies  bought  this  equipment  after  the  armistice.  The 
other  four  plants  were  sold  on  the  market,  the  machinery  even- 
tually finding  its  way  into  the  new  industry  which  is  taking 


Photo  by  Howard  E.  Coffin 

AMERICAN  FIELD  GUNS  ON  THE  RHINE 


Photo  by  Howard  E.  Coffin 

AMERICAN  GUN  ON  EHRENBREITSTEIN,  COBLENZ 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

DESTROYING  CAPTURED  GERMAN  AMMUNITION 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

A  CAPTURED  AMMUNITION  DUMP 


AMMUNITION  AND  OTHER  ORDNANCE    183 

gasoline  from  natural  gas.  The  Government  sold  out  com- 
pletely its  two  T.  N.  T.  plants,  which  were  located  respectively 
at  Racine,  Wisconsin,  and  Giant,  California. 

One  of  the  most  notable  enterprises  in  all  the  liquidation 
of  war  industry  was  that  of  closing  up  the  war  project  for  the 
fixation  of  atmospheric  nitrogen  and  the  placing  of  that  under- 
taking upon  a  permanent  peace  footing.  In  order  to  conduct 
this  enterprise  intelligently  the  Secretary  of  War  selected  cer- 
tain scientists  and  men  of  business  experience  to  study  every 
phase  of  the  subject  of  the  military  and  commercial  fixation 
of  nitrogen  and  to  recommend  to  the  War  Department  what 
disposition  to  make  of  the  war  fixation  plants.  This  board  was 
known  as  the  Fixed  Nitrogen  Administration. 

In  1916  the  United  States,  almost  entirely  dependent  upon 
foreign  sources  for  its  supply  of  commercial  nitrogen,  took  the 
first  step  toward  independence  by  appropriating  $20,000,000 
for  the  work  of  developing  a  domestic  fixation  industry.  With 
this  money  the  Corps  of  Engineers  began,  about  the  time  we  de- 
clared war  against  Germany,  the  construction  of  a  great  dam 
to  arrest  the  power  of  the  Tennessee  River  at  Muscle  Shoals, 
Alabama.  This  project,  including  a  hydroelectric  power 
house,  was  set  for  completion  in  1923.  The  head  of  water  at 
Muscle  Shoals  is  expected  to  provide  from  100,000  to  200,- 
000  horsepower  continuously,  and  during  nine  months  of  the 
year  high  water  will  produce  a  secondary  power  almost  as 
great. 

Aware  that  this  development  would  in  all  probability  not 
come  through  in  time  to  serve  the  war  explosives  program, 
soon  after  the  declaration  of  war  the  Government  entered 
upon  an  enormous  project  to  fix  atmospheric  nitrogen  with 
power  developed  from  coal.  Five  fixation  plants  of  this  sort 
were  from  first  to  last  authorized.  Three  of  these  were  com- 
pletely built,  and  the  other  two  were  partially  constructed 
before  their  projects  were  canceled. 

In  the  fall  of  1917  the  War  Department  began  the  con- 
struction of  a  nitrogen  plant  at  Sheffield,  Alabama,  and  in 
1918  completed  it,  at  a  cost  of  about  $13,000,000.  This  plant 


i84  DEMOBILIZATION 

produced  usable  nitrogen  in  the  form  of  ammonium  nitrate, 
a  product  used  with  trinitrotoluol  in  the  production  of  the  im- 
portant shell-explosive  amatol.  It  used  the  modified  German 
Haber  process,  combining  hydrogen  and  nitrogen  to  form 
ammonia,  which  is  oxidized  into  nitric  acid,  which  in  turn  is 
combined  with  ammonia  to  form  ammonium  nitrate.  This 
plant  produced  its  first  ammonia  in  September,  1918,  and  its 
first  ammonium  nitrate  on  the  second  day  of  the  armistice.  The 
process,  however,  was  never  satisfactorily  developed  in  this 
plant. 

The  second  fixation-plant  project  was  inaugurated  in  the 
autumn  of  1917  about  the  time  the  Interallied  Ordnance 
Agreement  put  upon  the  United  States  the  burden  of  pro- 
ducing most  of  the  powder  and  explosives  used  by  the  Allies, 
thus  tremendously  increasing  our  need  of  nitrogen.  It  was  no 
time  to  be  experimenting  with  processes.  The  one  fixation 
process  of  proved  success  known  in  the  United  States  was  the 
cyanamid  process,  used  by  the  American  Cyanamid  Company 
at  its  plant  at  Niagara  Falls.  The  Government  therefore  en- 
gaged this  concern  to  build  an  enormous  fixation  plant  at 
Muscle  Shoals,  a  plant  which  was  to  use  steam  power  until 
the  hydroelectric  power  from  the  river  should  become  avail- 
able. On  the  day  of  the  armistice  this  plant,  known  as  the 
No.  2  Nitrate  Plant,  was  nearly  complete:  it  turned  out  its 
first  ammonium  nitrate  within  two  weeks  thereafter.  It  cost 
$70,000,000  and  had  a  capacity  of  110,000  tons  of  ammo- 
nium nitrate  a  year.  The  test  runs  indicated  that  the  plant 
could  fix  nitrogen  at  a  cost  commercially  practicable. 

Two  other  plants,  both  to  use  the  cyanamid  process,  were 
projected  in  1918,  and  the  Government  began  the  construc- 
tion of  both  of  them.  One  was  at  Toledo,  Ohio,  and  the  other 
at  Cincinnati.  Their  combined  capacity  was  to  equal  the  capac- 
ity of  the  Muscle  Shoals  plant.  At  the  armistice  the  construc- 
tion of  these  plants  was  well  under  way,  but  the  Government 
terminated  both  projects,  at  a  net  cost  of  $12,000,000. 

The  fifth  plant  was  built  by  the  Bureau  of  Mines  for  the 
Chemical  Warfare  Service  at  Saltville,  Virginia.  It  used  the 


AMMUNITION  AND  OTHER  ORDNANCE    185 

Bucher  process,  producing  fixed  atmospheric  nitrogen  in  the 
form  of  sodium  cyanide,  a  chemical  used  in  the  manufacture 
of  toxic  war  gases.  It  was  about  complete  at  the  time  of  the 
armistice,  having  cost  the  Government  $2,500,000.  A  test 
run  indicated  that  the  Bucher  process  was  too  costly  to  be 
practicable  in  normal  times. 

The  Fixed  Nitrogen  Administration,  in  its  report,  recom- 
mended that  the  Saltville  plant  be  abandoned,  but  that  the 
plant  at  Sheffield  and  the  one  at  Muscle  Shoals  be  retained 
permanently,  the  modified  Haber  process  at  the  No.  1  Plant 
to  be  developed  by  further  research.  No.  2  Plant  at  Muscle 
Shoals  was  designated  as  the  principal  peace-time  source  of 
nitrates  within  the  United  States,  and  the  report  advised  the 
United  States  to  remain  in  the  nitrates  business  as  a  commer- 
cial producer  of  fertilizer  material,  the  Government  to  operate 
through  a  corporation  similar  to  that  which  operates  the 
Panama  Railroad  and  its  related  steamship  line.  This  report 
was  based  upon  research  which  sent  a  commission  of  experts 
to  Europe  to  study  fixation  processes  there,  and  which  even 
cultivated  experimental  farms  in  the  United  States  to  deter- 
mine by  practical  tests  upon  growing  crops  the  fertilizing 
value  of  various  forms  of  fixed  atmospheric  nitrogen. 

The  armistice  found  dozens  upon  dozens  of  American  fac- 
tories and  machine  shops,  both  large  and  small,  engaged  ex- 
clusively in  producing  the  metallic  shell  used  by  the  field 
artillery.  This  in  itself  was  an  industry  of  great  size.  The 
industry  had  not  yet  attained  its  production  peak,  but  it  was 
rapidly  nearing  that  point;  so  nearly  so  that,  during  the  taper- 
ing-off  process,  the  factories  working  only  eight  hours  of  each 
twenty- four  (as  compared  with  the  pre-armistice  three-shift, 
twenty-four-hour  day),  the  output  was  enormous.  Take,  as  an 
example,  the  75-millimeter  size  alone.  In  sixteen  months  be- 
fore the  armistice  the  mills,  working  continuously  twenty-four 
hours  a  day,  produced  about  10,000,000  forgings  for  75- 
millimeter  shell.  The  same  mills  after  the  armistice,  working 
now  only  eight  hours  each  day  and  tapering  off  their  work  as 


1 86  DEMOBILIZATION 

rapidly  as  possible,  in  the  two  months  before  the  wheels 
stopped,  produced  9,000,000  additional  forgings. 

The  total  production  of  the  metallic  elements  of  artillery 
shell,  both  before  and  after  the  armistice,  recorded  some  totals 
of  fantastic  size.  It  should  be  remembered  that  for  the  most 
part  our  war  shell  were  of  the  European  nose-fuse  type  and 
therefore  unlike  any  shell  which  the  War  Department  had 
ever  produced  before.  An  apparently  simple  manufacturing 
proposition  turned  out  to  be  a  most  difficult  one,  particularly 
in  the  production  of  two  small  but  important  elements  of  the 
nose-fuse  shell,  the  booster,  which  accelerates  the  rate  of 
explosion,  and  the  adapter,  which  holds  the  booster  in  place. 
It  was  months  before  our  manufacturers  could  produce 
boosters  and  adapters  successfully,  but  then  the  effort  came 
along  with  a  rush.  When  production  ceased  the  Ordnance 
Department  had  26,000,000  boosters  and  adapters  to  dispose 
of.  Other  surpluses  for  salvage  were  60,000,000  shell  forg- 
ings, 60,000,000  shell  machinings,  60,000,000  cannon  car- 
tridge cases,  nearly  70,000,000  metal  parts  for  grenades,  and 
over  6,000,000  metal  parts  for  trench  mortar  shell. 

The  demobilization  policy  was  to  store  reserves  of  shell 
sufficient  to  meet  the  consumption  of  an  army  of  1,000,000 
men  during  six  months  of  active  field  service.  In  the  75-milli- 
meter size,  for  instance,  such  a  reserve  meant  2,500,000  shell. 
Since  we  had  produced  15,000,000  75-millimeter  shell,  it  is 
evident  that  the  Ordnance  Department  found  on  its  hands 
12,500,000  such  shell  to  be  disposed  of  in  some  way.  Surpluses 
in  other  sizes  were  also  large.  The  steel  strike  of  the  autumn  of 
1919  occurred  opportunely  for  those  disposing  of  the  excess 
shell,  for  it  enabled  the  surplus  metal  to  be  sold  at  good  prices 
as  melting  scrap.  A  brisk  demand  for  shell  and  cartridge  cases 
as  souvenirs  also  absorbed  a  surprisingly  large  quantity  of  the 
excess  materials. 

As  in  the  demobilization  of  the  artillery  industry,  here  in 
the  shell-making  industry  we  see  at  work  the  same  prepared- 
ness policy  of  designating  established  arsenals  and  retained 
stand-by  plants  to  be  a  manufacturing  reserve  against  some 


AMMUNITION  AND  OTHER  ORDNANCE    187 

future  war  emergency.  Frankford  and  Picatinny  arsenals  were 
selected  to  inherit  the  shell-making  facilities  created  in  private 
plants  during  the  war.  At  Frankford  Arsenal  was  concentrated 
an  equipment  able  to  manufacture  daily  6,000  shell,  ranging 
from  75  millimeters  to  240  millimeters.  The  Frankford  shell 
plant  was  made  a  complete  unit,  capable  of  taking  billet  steel, 
forging  out  the  shell  blanks,  machining  them,  and  turning  out 
shell  ready  for  loading.  At  Picatinny  Arsenal  was  created  an 
experimental  shell  plant  with  a  daily  capacity  of  300  shell  of 
all  sizes. 

As  an  addition  to  the  two  arsenals,  but  as  a  subsidiary  to  the 
Frankford  Arsenal,  the  Ordnance  Department  retained  the 
155-millimeter  shell  factory  of  the  Symington- Anderson  Com- 
pany at  Chicago  and  equipped  it  as  an  enormous  stand-by  shell 
factory  with  facilities  for  producing  simultaneously  155- 
millimeter  and  240-millimeter  shell.  This  plant  has  been 
named  the  Chicago  Storage  Depot.  Here  was  concentrated 
most  of  the  special-purpose  shell-making  machinery  acquired 
by  the  Ordnance  Department  during  the  war.  It  consists  to- 
day of  two  departments.  The  active  manufacturing  depart- 
ment exists  in  ordinary,  all  machinery  ready  for  immediate 
operation.  In  the  storage  department  exists  special  machinery 
with  a  capacity  for  producing  nearly  70,000  shell  daily.  This 
machinery  is  catalogued  and  assembled  in  factory  layouts, 
virtually  complete  except  for  the  ordinary  commercial  ma- 
chinery used  in  the  manufacturing  processes,  so  that  on  short 
notice  the  Ordnance  Department  can  ship  from  the  depot 
shell-making  units  up  to  whatever  capacity  any  future  war 
contractor  may  wish  to  undertake.  The  installed  equipment  of 
the  active  manufacturing  department  has  a  daily  capacity  of 
12,000  shell.  In  1917  the  shell-making  capacity  of  the  United 
States  was  small,  and  it  was  a  year  before  facilities  could  be 
created  and  production  started  on  a  quantity  basis.  The  reserve 
industrial  equipment  to-day  gives  us  a  daily  manufacturing 
capacity  of  nearly  90,000  shell,  a  sufficient  supply  for  a  field 
army  of  1,000,000  men  until  a  new  shell-making  industry  can 
come  into  existence. 


i88  DEMOBILIZATION 

Powder  and  shell  after  manufacture  went  to  the  various 
sorts  of  loading  plants,  the  propellant  powder  to  be  loaded 
into  cartridge  cases  (for  field  guns  of  smaller  calibers)  or  bags 
(for  the  bigger  guns)  and  the  high  explosive  to  be  poured  or 
packed  into  the  shell,  boosters,  or  fuses.  In  carrying  on  this 
enterprise  the  Government  either  built  or  fostered  the  creation 
of  seventeen  great  loading  plants,  eight  of  them — employing 
35,000  persons,  most  of  whom  were  women — being  owned 
entirely  by  the  Government.  These  had  cost  from  $5,000,000 
to  $12,000,000  apiece.  A  few  of  these  government  institutions 
were  retained  by  the  War  Department  after  the  armistice. 
The  shell-loading  plant  at  Amatol,  New  Jersey,  was  added  to 
the  arsenal  system  under  the  name  of  the  Amatol  Arsenal,  but 
the  machinery  was  condemned  for  salvage.  The  Amatol  Ar- 
senal is  being  used  principally  as  a  depot  for  the  storage  of 
reserve  shell-loading  machinery  acquired  during  the  war.  A 
fire  in  October,  1918,  destroyed  the  government  shell-loading 
plant  at  Morgan,  New  Jersey,  and  a  temporary  storage  depot 
was  erected  on  the  site.  The  two  bag-loading  plants  at  Wood- 
bury, New  Jersey,  and  Seven  Pines,  Virginia,  were  disposed 
of  after  the  armistice;  but  the  third,  at  Tullytown,  Pennsyl- 
vania, as  the  Tullytown  Arsenal,  was  retained  as  an  ammuni- 
tion storage  depot.  Four  other  shell-loading  plants  were  re- 
tained as  storage  depots,  and  at  these  several  points  exist  the 
great  reserves  of  loaded  ammunition  and  of  ammunition  com- 
ponents left  by  the  war. 

Nearly  all  the  loading  machinery  was  concentrated  at 
Amatol  and  Picatinny  arsenals.  At  Picatinny  also  was  set  up 
an  experimental  plant  for  the  development  of  processes  in 
loading  powder  and  explosives.  This  plant  also  contains 
machinery  for  loaded  pyrotechnics  in  rockets,  star  shell,  and 
signal-pistol  cartridges.  One  piece  of  equipment  is  a  dark 
tunnel  in  which  the  candle  power  of  field  illuminants  can  be 
tested.  The  plant  includes  facilities  for  loading  grenades,  fuses, 
and  boosters. 

The  American  Expeditionary  Forces  after  the  armistice  had 
on  their  hands  some  65,000  tons  of  field  ammunition,  mostly 


AMMUNITION  AND  OTHER  ORDNANCE    189 

of  French  manufacture,  besides  several  thousand  tons  of  Ger- 
man ammunition  taken  in  the  advance  to  the  Rhine  under  the 
terms  of  the  armistice  agreement.  At  first  it  was  thought  that 
the  French  ammunition,  shipped  to  the  United  States,  would 
be  a  military  asset  for  several  years  to  come;  but  as  the  months 
went  on  it  became  evident  that,  instead  of  being  an  asset,  this 
ammunition  was  an  embarrassment  and  a  liability,  and  finally 
the  War  Department  was  glad  enough  to  pay  various  foreign 
governments  to  take  it  off  its  hands. 

Gas  shell,  for  instance,  it  was  thought,  could  not  be  stored, 
because  the  contained  chemicals  would  soon  destroy  the  metal, 
and  the  shell  would  begin  to  leak  their  lethal  contents.  Later 
experience,  however,  showed  that  there  was  no  sound  basis  for 
such  an  apprehension.  In  the  advance  through  Belgium,  Alsace- 
Lorraine,  Luxemburg,  and  the  German  Rhine  country,  the 
American  forces  collected  about  7,000  tons  of  German  ammu- 
nition, none  of  which  would  fit  our  own  guns  and  much  of 
which  consisted  of  gas  shell.  The  gas  shell  could  not  be  de- 
stroyed in  dumps  because  of  the  danger  to  civilians  in  the 
neighborhood.  The  only  safe  method  of  destruction  was  to 
transport  it  to  sea  and  sink  it  in  deep  water;  but  the  A.  E.  F. 
had  no  labor  to  spare  for  this  work,  and,  besides,  the  French 
Government  refused  to  allow  the  gas  shell  to  be  shipped  on 
the  French  railroads.  Finally,  for  a  price,  the  French  them- 
selves undertook  to  dispose  of  this  German  gas  ammunition. 

In  Belgium  we  had  6,000  tons  of  captured  German  ammu- 
nition. The  Belgians  could  not  use  it,  forbade  its  destruction 
in  dumps  because  these  dumps  were  in  territory  which  had  not 
been  devastated  by  the  war,  and  would  not  permit  it  to  be 
moved  by  rail  to  the  devastated  districts,  because  of  the 
supposed  danger  from  the  gas  shell.  The  A.  E.  F.  therefore  had 
6,000  tons  of  ammunition  which  it  could  not  use,  give  away, 
destroy,  or  move.  Finally,  by  agreeing  to  give  the  Belgians  a 
large  quantity  of  German  engineering  and  construction  mate- 
rial found  in  this  area,  the  American  authorities  induced  the 
Belgian  Government  to  accept  responsibility  for  this  ammu- 
nition. 


190  DEMOBILIZATION 

The  German  ammunition  found  in  Germany  was  sold  to 
German  contractors,  and,  under  the  eyes  of  American  inspec- 
tors, changed  into  useful  commercial  products. 

As  to  the  A.  E.  F.'s  own  65,000  tons  of  loaded  shell,  it  was 
decided  to  destroy  all  gas  shell  and  all  explosive  shell  and 
cartridges  loaded  with  explosives  of  doubtful  stability  and  to 
return  the  rest  to  the  United  States.  The  work  of  shipping  the 
serviceable  ammunition  home  actually  started,  but  it  went  on 
slowly  because  of  the  lack  both  of  labor  and  of  ammunition 
ships.  A  fire  destroyed  one  of  the  three  collection  dumps  in  the 
Chateau-Thierry  area.  As  the  ships  repatriated  the  A.  E.  F. 
at  a  faster  and  faster  rate,  the  various  army  areas  were  evacu- 
ated one  by  one,  but  it  was  necessary  to  leave  guards  behind 
at  the  various  ammunition  dumps.  Then  the  War  Department 
began  studying  the  problem  with  a  practical  eye.  Nearly  all 
this  ammunition  was  "war  quality" :  good  enough  for  rapid 
consumption  on  the  field,  but  made  hurriedly  by  inexperienced 
labor  under  conditions  that  made  its  permanent  stability  ques- 
tionable. It  was  found  to  be  impossible  to  separate  the  better 
ammunition  from  that  of  doubtful  stability.  It  was  conceded 
that  under  ideal  conditions  this  ammunition  might  be  stored 
safely  for  five  years.  Some  of  it  had  already  been  stored  for 
eighteen  months;  it  would  take  at  least  a  year  to  transport  it 
all  to  the  United  States ;  and  therefore  in  this  country  it  would 
be  good  for  only  a  brief  time.  Accordingly  the  A.  E.  F.  authori- 
ties negotiated  with  the  French  to  assume  liability  for  the 
ammunition,  and  it  all  went  into  the  general  settlement  of 
1919  with  the  French,  but  as  an  American  liability  reducing 
the  financial  liability  of  the  French  under  the  agreement. 

The  chief  permanent  benefits  accruing  to  the  United  States 
from  its  extensive  war  industry  engaged  in  the  manufacture  of 
instruments  for  sighting  and  controlling  the  fire  of  field  guns 
were  ( 1 )  a  reserve  of  optical  instruments  of  the  most  advanced 
types,  some  of  which  had  previously  been  produced  only  by  the 
French,  (2)  a  large  collection  of  machinery  for  making  these 
and  similar  instruments,  and  (3)  an  optical  glass  industry 
more  than  sufficient  to  the  nonnal  needs  of  the  country.  Before 


AMMUNITION  AND  OTHER  ORDNANCE    191 

1914  little,  if  any,  optical  glass  had  been  produced  in  the 
United  States.  In  demobilizing  this  industry,  the  Ordnance 
Department  took  care  that  all  these  military  assets  were 
properly  fitted  into  the  preparedness  plan. 

Again  we  see  at  work  the  policy  of  centering  future  pro- 
duction in  an  arsenal.  Frankford  Arsenal  was  designated  as 
the  military  center  for  fire-control  instruments,  and  here  were 
brought  the  reserves  of  materials  and  tools  acquired  by  the 
Government  in  the  course  of  the  enterprise. 

The  production  of  some  of  the  artillery  sights  proved  to  be 
almost  beyond  the  mechanical  ability  of  American  workmen. 
It  took  three  skilled  organizations  to  produce  the  panoramic 
sights.  Warner  &  Swasey,  of  Cleveland,  built  these  sights,  but 
had  to  turn  to  the  J.  A.  Brashear  Company,  of  Pittsburg,  for 
the  optical-glass  prisms  to  go  into  them.  That  company,  in 
turn,  did  not  have  a  skilled  force  large  enough  to  correct  the 
roof  angles  of  all  the  prisms  required.  The  Ordnance  Depart- 
ment found  a  man  who  understood  the  correction  of  optical 
plane  surfaces  in  the  person  of  Dr.  G.  W.  Ritchey  of  the  Mt. 
Wilson  Observatory,  Pasadena,  California.  He  trained  a  num- 
ber of  men  in  this  recondite  craft,  and  they  staffed  an  impor- 
tant department  of  the  extensive  optical  shop  which  the  Carne- 
gie Institution  built  at  government  expense  at  Pasadena. 

An  extensive  production  of  military  optical  instruments  was 
permitted  after  the  armistice  and  before  the  contracts  were 
terminated.  The  work  of  producing  some  of  these  instruments 
was  long  and  difficult,  the  instruments  themselves  would  not 
deteriorate  in  storage,  and  the  evolution  and  improvement  of 
such  instruments  is  slow.  Moreover,  the  labor  cost  is  by  far 
the  greatest  cost  in  making  optical  instruments.  The  value  of 
the  unfinished  components  as  scrap,  even  from  an  industry 
as  large  as  that  created  in  1917-1918,  with  its  eighty-three 
factories  at  work  on  contracts  of  a  value  of  $50,000,000,  was 
almost  negligible.  As  a  result  of  this  permission  to  proceed, 
the  industry  reached  its  peak  of  production  late  in  January, 
1919.  The  only  contracts  terminated  were  those  under  which 
no  production  had  begun  before  the  armistice,  those  the  hold- 


1 92  DEMOBILIZATION 

ers  of  which  asked  for  termination,  and  those  which  had 
already  produced  undue  excesses  of  easily  made  articles. 

The  largest  producer  of  army  optical  instruments,  the 
Bausch  &  Lomb  Optical  Company,  of  Rochester,  held  con- 
tracts amounting  to  more  than  $6,000,000  in  value  and  pro- 
duced before  the  armistice  materials  worth  over  $3,000,000. 
The  War  Department  obtained  no  machinery  from  this  plant 
when  the  contracts  were  terminated,  but  it  received  and 
shipped  to  Frankford  Arsenal  large  quantities  of  finished  parts 
of  instruments.  The  present  optical  shop  at  Frankford  was 
largely  equipped  with  machinery  originally  procured  by  the 
Recording  &  Computing  Machines  Company  of  Dayton.  This 
company,  which  had  never  built  optical  instruments  before 
the  war,  took  contracts  worth  $4,000,000,  built  and  equipped 
a  complete  optical  plant,  and  became  a  producer,  among  other 
things  developing  a  mechanical  method  of  milling  glass  for 
prisms.  Similar  methods  of  demobilization  were  followed  at 
all  the  war  factories  making  sights  and  fire-control  instru- 
ments: desirable  machinery  and  unfinished  components  were 
collected  at  Frankford  Arsenal,  and  the  excess  materials  were 
sold.  This  plan  put  thousands  of  instruments  into  the  war 
reserves,  enough  of  some  sorts  to  maintain  the  military  estab- 
lishment for  years  to  come.  Of  certain  important  classes  of 
instruments  the  quantities  obtained  from  the  war  industry  are 
deficient. 

Between  the  year  1914,  when  war  broke  out,  shutting  off 
the  export  of  optical  glass  from  Germany,  and  1917,  when 
the  United  States  went  into  the  war,  five  American  organiza- 
tions— the  Bureau  of  Standards,  the  Pittsburg  Plate  Glass 
Company,  Keuffel  &  Esser,  the  Spencer  Lens  Company,  and 
Bausch  &  Lomb — developed  the  manufacture  of  optical  glass 
on  a  small  scale,  but  in  quality  the  glass  was  not  up  to  the 
European  standard.  In  the  spring  of  1917,  scientists  of  the 
Carnegie  Institution  of  Washington  stepped  in  to  help  the 
manufacturers  with  their  glass  problems,  and  complete  co- 
operation all  along  the  line  resulted  in  a  successful  industry 
before  many  months  had  gone  by.  The  four  commercial  pro- 


AMMUNITION  AND  OTHER  ORDNANCE    193 

ducers  eventually  turned  out  optical  glass  more  rapidly  than 
both  the  Army  and  Navy  could  use  it.  Some  of  this  glass  was 
the  equal  of  any  ever  made  in  Germany,  and  much  of  it, 
though  of  "war  quality,"  was  still  good  enough  for  many 
uses.  The  army  ordnance  contracts  were  entirely  with  Bausch 
&  Lomb  and  the  Pittsburg  Plate  Glass  Company  at  its  Char- 
leroi  (Pennsylvania)  plant.  The  production  of  glass  on  the 
war  contracts  was  terminated  immediately  after  the  armistice. 
A  large  quantity  of  glass  not  yet  formed  into  sets  of  optics  was 
stored  at  Frankford.  The  Pittsburg  Plate  Glass  Company  did 
not  resume  any  production,  but  Bausch  &  Lomb  continued  to 
make  optical  glass  for  their  own  uses. 

Those  who  assume  that,  because  we  created  an  ample  opti- 
cal glass  industry  during  the  war,  the  United  States  is  to  be 
forever  free  of  dependence  upon  foreign  sources  of  this  com- 
modity, probably  are  too  optimistic.  There  are  numerous  rea- 
sons why  an  optical  glass  industry  is  not  likely  to  survive  in 
the  United  States,  at  least  on  any  large  scale.  The  total  normal 
American  consumption  of  optical  glass  amounts  to  less  than 
$1,000,000  a  year — not  enough  to  support  many  glass-making 
establishments.  Secondly,  nearly  all  the  Allies  developed  war 
glass  industries  of  their  own,  and  the  result  is  that  the  world 
has  a  large  surplus  of  optical  glass,  which,  if  of  good  quality, 
does  not  deteriorate  in  storage.  Thirdly,  the  war  expansion  of 
the  world  industry  has  created  facilities  above  the  present 
normal  world  requirements.  In  the  fourth  place,  the  industry 
is  a  precarious  one,  subject  to  heavy  losses  from  carelessness 
or  ineptitude  in  the  mill.  In  the  fifth,  there  is  no  tariff  pro- 
tection for  American  glass,  the  law  permitting  the  free  impor- 
tation of  precision  optics  for  scientific  purposes.  Finally,  there 
is  a  long-standing  prejudice  in  favor  of  European-made  scien- 
tific instruments,  a  prejudice  against  which  an  American  in- 
dustry would  have  to  fight.  Three  American  producers,  however, 
are  said  to  be  making  optical  glass  for  their  trade. 

In  anticipation  of  a  possible  collapse  of  the  industry,  the 
Bureau  of  Standards  has  brought  to  Washington  the  glass- 
making  facilities  which  it  set  up  in  a  special  war  plant  at 


1 94  DEMOBILIZATION 

Pittsburg,  This  plant  can  make  two  tons  of  optical  glass  a 
month.  It  is  to  be  operated  by  the  Government  with  the  view 
both  of  improving  processes  and  of  creating  within  the  Gov- 
ernment an  expert  knowledge  of  this  vital  war  industry. 

The  United  States  carried  further  than  any  other  nation 
in  the  war  the  substitution  of  mechanical  power  for  the  power 
of  draft  animals  in  the  movement  of  field  artillery.  Nothing 
in  our  army  equipment  in  France  did  the  French,  themselves 
the  premier  artillerists  of  the  world,  admire  more  than  our 
motorization  of  artillery.  The  total  contracts  for  ordnance 
vehicles  represented  an  expenditure  of  $400,000,000.  The 
program  actually  delivered  13,000  vehicles  to  the  A.  E.  F., 
produced  before  the  armistice  an  equal  number  ready  for  ship- 
ment abroad,  and  had  60,000  other  vehicles  under  construc- 
tion when  the  halt  came.  The  Maxwell-Chalmers  plant  at 
Detroit  and  the  Reo  plant  at  Lansing,  working  in  cooperation, 
were  producing  1,100  5-ton  tractors  a  month,  and  this  pro- 
duction represented  the  military  power  of  12,000  draft 
animals  and  4,000  men. 

The  demobilization  of  this  industry  was  accomplished 
rapidly.  Orders  were  cut  to  the  bone,  merely  enough  post- 
armistice  production  being  allowed  to  enable  the  plants  to 
dovetail  their  war  business  into  the  resumption  of  their  com- 
mercial businesses.  Since  little  special-purpose  machinery  was 
required  in  producing  war  tractors,  the  Ordnance  Department 
created  no  manufacturing  center  after  the  armistice  as  a  source 
of  future  supply.  The  war  left  the  Army,  however,  with  a 
number  of  engineers  who  had  gained  experience  in  adapting 
mechanical  power  to  military  uses  in  the  field,  and  these  men 
are  continuing  a  development  which,  doubtless,  will  in  time 
eliminate  the  horse  from  our  artillery  regiments. 

One  of  the  innovations  of  the  war  was  the  motor-driven 
mobile  repair  shop  for  repairing  artillery  in  the  field.  Each 
shop  consisted  of  two  sections,  with  fifteen  trucks  and  four- 
teen trailers  in  each  section — ^nearly  sixty  vehicles  to  the  entire 
shop.  On  the  trailers  were  installed  the  heavy  machine  tools, 
and  one  trailer  of  each  section  was  equipped  with  an  electric 


AMMUNITION  AND  OTHER  ORDNANCE    195 

generator  for  light  and  power.  When  the  shop  was  set  up  for 
business  it  presented  the  spectacle  of  two  rings  of  vehicles 
ranged  around  the  two  power  plants  and  hooked  up  with 
electric  cables.  The  manufacturing  program,  both  before  and 
after  the  armistice,  produced  sixteen  such  shops,  consisting  of 
600  vehicles.  Six  of  these  shops  have  been  stored;  ten  are  in 
use  by  the  permanent  establishments.  In  addition,  in  terminat- 
ing the  contracts  the  Ordnance  Department  came  into  pos- 
session of  the  unassembled  but  finished  components  of  eight 
additional  shops.  Thousands  of  jigs,  fixtures,  and  small  tools 
used  in  this  manufacturing  project  have  been  stored  away  and 
catalogued. 

Tank  production  was  drastically  curtailed  immediately 
after  the  armistice.  The  tank  contracts  involved  the  expendi- 
ture of  $175,000,000.  The  total  production  of  6-ton  Renault 
tanks  was  limited  to  950,  of  which  sixty-four  were  produced 
before  the  armistice.  The  contracts  with  the  Ford  Motor  Com- 
pany to  build  15,000  3-ton  tanks  were  terminated  at  once 
after  the  armistice,  production  being  limited  to  the  fifteen  trial 
machines  produced  before  November  11,  1918.  Of  the  great 
36-ton  tanks,  Anglo-American  design,  the  Ordnance  Depart- 
ment built  100  at  Rock  Island  Arsenal  after  the  armistice, 
procuring  from  the  British  for  the  purpose  the  hulls  and  guns. 
The  tank  assembly  plant  at  Chateauroux,  France,  went  to  the 
French  Government  in  the  general  settlement  of  1919  and  is 
now  being  used  as  a  car  repair  shop. 

No  considerations  of  future  reserves  of  finished  materials 
affected  the  demobilization  of  the  extensive  war  industry 
which  was  manufacturing  our  rifles,  machine  guns,  pistols,  and 
the  ammunition  for  them.  The  production  of  these  articles  had 
been  so  successful  that  the  moment  the  war  ended  the  sup- 
plies on  hand  were  sufficient  for  the  permanent  Army  for 
years  to  come,  with  reserve  supplies  heavy  enough  to  arm  a 
large  field  force.  The  interests  of  the  Army,  considered  alone, 
therefore,  demanded  the  immediate  cessation  after  the  armi- 
stice of  all  this  manufacture ;  but  economic  considerations  and 
the  dictates  of  good  business  practice  made  it  expedient  to 


1 96  DEMOBILIZATION 

taper  off  this  production  gradually,  even  at  the  cost  of  pro- 
ducing more  materials  than  the  War  Department  could 
possibly  use. 

Special  problems  arose  in  the  liquidation  of  this  great  indus- 
try. In  the  first  place,  the  factories  which  made  rifles  and 
machine  guns  were  sharply  specialized  for  just  this  work, 
making  it  difficult  for  them  to  turn  to  any  commercial  pro- 
duction with  the  same  equipment.  Several  of  these  plants  were 
specially  created  for  the  war  work,  and  therefore  had  no  pre- 
war occupation  to  which  they  could  turn.  It  was  necessary  for 
them  either  to  close  out  entirely  (as  the  Eddystone  rifle  plant 
of  the  Midvale  Steel  &  Ordnance  Company  near  Philadelphia 
actually  did  do)  or  to  develop  some  new  product.  Two  of  the 
small-arms  plants  after  the  armistice  added  departments  for 
the  manufacture  of  ball  bearings,  one  went  into  the  production 
of  automobile  accessories  and  sporting  arms,  and  a  fourth 
(which  had  made  bayonets)  took  up  the  manufacture  of 
cutlery.  It  was  necessary  to  give  these  concerns  time  to  work 
out  these  conversions,  if  an  acute  problem  in  unemployment 
were  to  be  avoided. 

The  sharp  centralization  of  the  small-arms  industry  in  the 
East  was  another  factor  which  influenced  the  Government  to 
permit  an  unwelcome  production  after  the  armistice.  Most  of 
the  rifles,  for  instance,  were  manufactured  within  a  small  area 
in  the  state  of  Connecticut.  The  Winchester  plant  at  New 
Haven  employed  20,000  operatives,  the  Remington  plant  at 
Bridgeport  12,000,  and  there  were  several  others  of  this  size. 
To  close  them  all  up  forthwith  would  have  created  a  bad 
industrial  situation  in  this  busy  and  prosperous  section  of  New 
England. 

The  policy  adopted,  therefore,  was  to  taper  off  the  pro- 
duction of  such  materials.  Upon  the  signing  of  the  armistice 
ten  American  plants  were  engaged  exclusively  in  the  produc- 
tion of  automatic  arms.  They  employed  20,000  persons.  They 
had  reached  a  daily  output  of  more  than  1,100  machine  guns 
and  automatic  rifles  on  contracts  calling  for  the  delivery  of 
650,000  such  weapons,  at  a  projected  cost  of  $193,000,000, 


AMMUNITION  AND  OTHER  ORDNANCE    197 

of  which  465,000  guns  were  as  yet  undelivered.  The  final  can- 
cellations stopped  the  production  of  382,000  guns,  making  the 
total  war  production  268,000  guns.  In  the  various  plants  the 
Government  had  invested  $11,000,000  in  machinery. 

By  January  15,  1919,  the  rate  of  producing  machine  guns 
had  been  cut  in  two.  By  June  28,  all  production  of  machine 
guns  had  stopped.  The  Springfield  and  Rock  Island  arsenals, 
always  the  Army's  development  and  manufacturing  centers 
for  small  arms,  were  selected  to  receive  the  reserve  manufac- 
turing equipment  acquired  by  the  Ordnance  Department  in 
the  prosecution  of  the  machine-gun  project.  One  unit  of 
machinery  sufficient  for  the  daily  manufacture  of  100  Brown- 
ing heavy  machine  guns,  and  another  unit  for  the  daily  manu- 
facture of  200  Browning  automatic  rifles  were  stored  at  Rock 
Island  Arsenal.  This  reserve  machinery  was  worth  about 
$4,275,000. 

Similar  measures  were  taken  in  the  demobilization  of  the 
war  rifle  industry.  Production  was  curtailed  gradually,  ceasing 
entirely  in  March,  1919.  Three  great  private  plants  and  two 
government  factories  (Springfield  Armory  and  Rock  Island 
Arsenal)  built  our  war  rifles.  The  War  Department  invested 
over  $22,000,000  in  machinery.  With  this  machinery  the 
rifle-making  departments  of  the  Springfield  Armory  and  the 
Rock  Island  Arsenal  were  practically  reequipped  to  produce 
the  Model  of  1903  (Springfield)  rifle.  The  Springfield  Armory 
(the  chief  future  manufacturing  center  for  this  arm)  was 
equipped  to  make  1,000  of  these  rifles  in  an  8-hour  day,  and 
Rock  Island,  600.  Working  at  full  speed,  both  centers  can  pro- 
duce 3,500  Springfield  rifles  every  twenty-four  hours.  In  addi- 
tion special  small  tools,  jigs,  and  fixtures  sufficient  for  the 
production  of  1,000  Model  of  1917  (Enfield)  rifles  daily  were 
stored  at  the  Springfield  Armory,  and  a  unit  of  manufacturing 
equipment  for  producing  500  automatic  pistols  daily  was  also 
stored  at  Springfield. 

Four-fifths  of  the  outstanding  orders  for  5,250,000,000 
rounds  of  rifle  and  pistol  cartridges  were  terminated  after  the 
armistice.  The  policy  adopted  was  to  permit  the  small-arms 


198  DEMOBILIZATION 

ammunition  factories  to  operate  until  September  1,  1919,  if 
they  so  elected;  but  their  production  in  that  time  could  not 
exceed  a  quantity  equal  to  what  they  might  have  produced  if 
they  had  operated  twenty-four  hours  a  day  from  the  armistice 
to  February  1,  1919.  This  policy  enabled  the  factories  to  dis- 
pense with  their  war  labor  slowly.  About  1,600,000,000 
rounds  of  small-arms  ammunition  were  stored  as  a  future  re- 
serve. The  War  Department  had  purchased  machinery  with  a 
total  producing  capacity  of  about  3,000,000  rounds  of  ammu- 
nition in  an  8-hour  day.  All  the  single-purpose  special  ma- 
chinery and  all  special  tools,  jigs,  and  fixtures  were  retained, 
and  with  them  the  Frankford  Arsenal  was  built  up  as  a  great 
center  for  the  manufacture  of  small-arms  ammunition.  Before 
1917  the  annual  productive  capacity  of  the  arsenal  was  not 
more  than  100,000,000  rounds  of  rifle  and  pistol  ammunition. 
The  Ordnance  Department  has  increased  this  capacity  to 
750,000  rounds  in  an  8-hour  day.  Immense  quantities  of 
bandoleers,  cartridge  clips,  cartridge  cases,  metal,  and  other 
ammunition  components  acquired  in  the  liquidation  have  been 
stored  for  future  use. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
AIRCRAFT 

NEXT  to  the  manufacture  of  ordnance,  the  production 
of  airplanes  and  balloons  and  their  accessories  was  the 
largest  war  enterprise  of  American  industry.  A  hun- 
dred thousand  workmen  toiled  in  the  aircraft  factories,  the 
business  of  which  was  represented  by  over  5,000  war  contracts 
with  a  face  value  of  several  hundred  million  dollars.  For  the 
airplanes  themselves,  the  contracts  involved  the  War  Depart- 
ment in  the  sum  of  $196,000,000,  but  this  branch  of  the  in- 
dustry was  but  a  small  part  of  the  entire  air  program.  Merely 
for  motor  trucks  the  Air  Service  entered  upon  commitments 
reaching  a  value  of  $45,000,000.  The  investment  in  flying 
fields,  balloon  schools,  and  other  physical  installations  erected 
during  the  war  in  the  United  States  was,  on  November  1 1 , 
1918,  approximately  $75,000,000.  Nearly  20,000  men  had 
been  trained  to  fly,  and  the  Air  Service  numbered  all  its  officers 
and  men  at  175,000 — an  organization  larger  than  the  regular 
army  establishment  in  1916.  On  Armistice  Day  the  Air  Service 
had  spent  $43,000,000  in  the  production  of  spruce  for  our  own 
airplane  factories  and  those  of  the  Allies.  For  this  investment 
it  had  to  show  a  great  logging  equipment,  including  sawmills, 
three  railroad  systems  (with  130  miles  of  trackage),  hotels, 
and  the  housing  for  thousands  of  woodsmen.  It  was  heavily  in- 
volved also  in  plans  for  the  production  of  other  raw  materials 
used  in  the  manufacture  of  airplanes — $30,000,000  invested 
or  obligated  in  the  development  of  a  chain  of  chemical  plants 
for  producing  "dope,"  the  varnish  that  stretches  and  water- 
proofs the  fabric  of  airplane  wings;  and  $8,000,000  tied  up  in 
the  fabric  itself  or  in  raw  cotton  for  weaving  into  fabric.  The 
Service  spent  over  $25,000,000  for  gasoline  and  oil.   The 


200  DEMOBILIZATION 

largest  enterprise  of  all  was  the  production  of  airplane  engines, 
the  contracts  for  which  reached  a  total  value  of  $450,000,000. 

These  figures  are  cited  to  show  the  enormous  size  of  our  air 
project,  to  show,  also,  how  small  a  part  of  a  balanced  air  pro- 
gram is  the  manufacture  of  the  airplanes  themselves,  and, 
finally,  to  controvert  and  refute  the  widespread,  the  almost 
universal,  impression  to-day  that  the  whole  air  program  of 
America  in  the  war  was  a  failure,  a  scandal,  and  a  blot  on  the 
fair  name  of  our  war  industry. 

The  average  American,  if  he  has  not  examined  the  record 
of  our  war  aircraft  program,  probably  holds  the  opinion  that 
a  billion  dollars  or  more  appropriated  for  aircraft  vanished  into 
thin  air  during  the  war,  and  that  all  we  had  to  show  for  the 
enormous  expenditure  was  a  few  hundred  airplanes  of  inferior 
design.  To  this  day  such  statements  are  still  being  made  by 
irresponsible  journalists  and  other  careless  critics  of  the  con- 
duct of  the  war.  Against  such  assertions  we  oppose  the  state- 
ment that  the  production  of  aeronautical  materials  during  the 
war  was  as  successful  as  any  other  great  branch  of  war  in- 
dustry, that  we  got  value  received  for  our  money — "war 
value,"  that  is — and  that  the  losses  incurred  were  the  natural 
and  inevitable  losses  to  be  expected  by  any  nation  unprepared 
for  war.  The  general  charge  of  shocking  waste  and  failure  re- 
poses upon  nothing  more  substantial  than  rumor  and  muddy 
impression.  Behind  the  rejoinder  we  are  able  to  marshal  the 
facts,  which  are,  with  the  demobilization  of  the  industry  vir- 
tually complete,  now  to  be  evaluated  as  a  whole. 

In  the  first  place,  how  much  money  did  we  actually  spend 
in  the  prosecution  of  the  great  aircraft  program^  A  billion  and 
a  half?  A  billion?  Not  at  all.  The  war  appropriations  for  the 
air  were  widely  advertised ;  the  acts  of  Congress  covering  back 
into  the  Treasury  the  unexpended  balances,  the  transfers  of  air 
service  funds  to  other  purposes,  and  the  recoveries  and  reim- 
bursements from  the  sales  of  surplus  materials  were  not  so 
well  advertised.  The  well-advertised  appropriations  came  to  a 
total  of  $1,691,854,758.  But  the  greater  part  of  these  appro- 
priations was  made  when  the  Air  Service  was  a  branch  of  the 


Photo  from  Packard  Motor   Car   Co. 

PREPARING  LIBERTY  ENGINES  FOR  STORAGE 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

ASSEMBLING  PLANT  AT  ROxMORANTIN 


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FLYING  FIELD  AT  ISSOUDUN 


Signal  Corps  Photo  from  drawing  by  J.  Andre  Smith 

LAME  DUCKS 


AIRCRAFT  201 

Signal  Corps,  and  a  considerable  sum  went  for  the  procurement 
of  signaling  materials  not  connected  with  aircraft  at  all.  More- 
over, when  the  armistice  came,  several  hundred  million  dollars 
of  these  authorizations  were  as  yet  untouched  by  those  procur- 
ing the  aircraft,  and  Congress  revoked  all  such  appropriations. 
When  the  subtractions  are  made  on  account  of  the  Signal 
Corps'  proper  business  and  on  account  of  revoked  appropria- 
tions, we  find  that  the  net  appropriation  on  account  of  the  air 
program  was  $1,158,070,773. 

But  this  vast  sum  is  still  far  above  the  sum  actually  spent. 
On  the  day  of  the  armistice  there  were  great  unexpended  bal- 
ances in  practically  all  the  appropriations  granted  to  the  Air 
Service,  and  these  balances  remained  great  after  the  liquidation 
of  the  industry.  Since  the  unexpended  balances  eventually  will 
be  recovered  into  the  general  funds  of  the  Treasury,  it  is  proper 
to  subtract  them  here ;  and  by  making  the  subtraction,  we  find 
that  the  war  expenditure  for  the  aircraft  program  was  approxi- 
mately $868,000,000.  Yet  even  this  was  not  net  expenditure. 
From  this  amount  there  is  still  to  be  subtracted  the  millions 
received  from  the  sale  and  transfer  of  surplus  materials,  the 
reimbursements  on  account  of  overpayments  to  contractors, 
and  other  items.  The  full  subtraction  of  these  credits  leaves  us 
with  a  net  war  expenditure  for  aircraft  of  approximately 
$720,000,000. 

This  figure,  indeed,  is  an  estimate;  but  it  is  a  close  estimate. 
It  is  an  estimate  because,  at  the  time  this  is  written  (July, 
1921),  the  liquidation  of  the  war  aircraft  industry  is  not  yet 
quite  complete.  Four  contractors'  claims  are  still  unsettled,  and 
surplus  worth  less  than  $18,000,000  remains  unsold.  There- 
fore, even  if  the  estimated  cost  of  settling  the  claims  and  the 
estimated  recovery  from  the  sale  of  surplus  are  grossly  in- 
accurate, such  errors  cannot  greatly  affect  the  total  estimate. 
The  last  official  financial  statement  on  the  war  business  of  the 
Air  Service,  dated  April  23,  1921,  showed  that  the  net  cost 
then  was  $738,133,972.28,  leaving  in  the  Treasury  at  that 
time  an  unexpended  balance  of  $419,936,801.20,  and  this 
cost  was  still  to  be  reduced  by  recoveries  from  the  sale  of 


202  DEMOBILIZATION 

surplus  and  by  reimbursements  of  overpayments  made  to  con- 
tractors in  the  settlements. 

Thus  we  have,  as  the  cost  of  the  war  air  program,  the  figure 
$720,000,000 — not  half  the  billion  and  a  half  alleged  by  the 
critics  to  have  been  wasted.  But  what  happened  to  the  $720,- 
000,000?  Was  it  wasted?  What  did  we  get  for  it?  The 
answers  to  these  questions  may  be  a  revelation  to  those  who 
have  accepted  the  common  misstatement  that  the  whole  project 
ended  in  a  colossal  failure. 

First,  airplanes.  For  the  money  spent  the  Army  received, 
not  a  few  hundred  airplanes,  but  approximately  19,000.  When 
the  money  was  appropriated,  those  in  charge  of  the  air  pro- 
gram, and  the  public,  too,  expected  these  funds  to  produce 
airplanes  in  numbers  sufficient  to  darken  the  skies.  Well,  here 
was  the  sky-darkening  cloud  of  them — 19,000  planes,  pro- 
duced and  delivered  to  the  Army.  And  at  least  half  this  number 
consisted  of  "service"  planes,  as  distinguished  from  training 
machines.  The  average  value  of  an  airplane  without  engine 
may  be  conservatively  placed  at  $6,000.  Thus,  the  planes  de- 
livered on  the  war  orders  were  worth  $114,000,000,  a  sum 
which  accounts  for  nearly  one-sixth  of  the  total  war  expendi- 
ture made  by  the  Air  Service.  In  round  numbers,  the  American 
industry  produced  12,000  of  these  planes  before  the  armistice, 
and  afterwards,  during  the  termination  of  the  work,  completed 
production  on  1,500  that  were  unfinished.  The  remaining  5,500 
were  purchased  from  the  French,  British,  and  Italian  indus- 
tries. Those  who  criticize  the  administration  of  this  branch  of 
our  war  industry  commonly  lose  sight  of  the  fact  that  all  the 
foreign  airplanes  procured  by  us  were  bought  with  the  funds 
appropriated  for  the  Air  Service. 

Planes,  however,  are  a  small  item  compared  with  some  of 
the  other  materials  procured  with  the  $720,000,000.  The 
American  industry  produced  30,000  aviation  engines  before 
the  armistice  and  more  than  11,000  afterwards  on  war  orders 
during  the  termination  of  the  industry — the  exact  figure, 
representing  the  total  war  production,  being  41,590.  Of  these, 
20,478  were  Liberty  engines,  15,572  of  which  were  produced 


AIRCRAFT  203 

before  November  30,  1918.  The  Liberty  engines  alone  repre- 
sented over  8,000,000  horsepower.  In  addition,  from  the 
$720,000,000  spent,  we  bought  several  thousand  aviation  en- 
gines in  Europe.  In  all  we  received  approximately  45,000 
engines  for  our  money.  At  $6,000  apiece — a  fair  average  price 
— this  procurement  accounted  for  $270,000,000  of  the  money. 
Planes  and  engines  together  accounted  for  $384,000,000,  or 
more  than  half  the  total  expenditure. 

This  was  all  value  received.  But  we  have  still  to  consider 
many  important  items  of  expense  necessary  to  the  prosecution 
of  an  air  project  such  as  ours  was.  It  took,  for  instance,  $190,- 
000,000  to  maintain  the  Air  Service  of  the  American  Expe- 
ditionary Forces.  The  appropriation  procured  1,100  balloons 
both  before  and  after  the  armistice,  at  a  cost,  say,  of  $1 1,000,- 
000.  As  we  have  noted  above,  $75,000,000  went  into  buildings 
for  the  Air  Service  in  this  country,  another  great  sum  into 
motor  trucks,  still  another  into  fuel  and  lubricating  oils,  and 
upwards  of  $80,000,000  into  the  development  of  raw  ma- 
terials for  airplane  manufacture — spruce,  dope,  and  fabric. 
This  last  was  a  necessary  and  justifiable  expenditure,  in  that 
it  sustained  the  airplane  industry,  not  only  of  the  United 
States,  but  of  the  principal  Allies  as  well.  Too,  the  develop- 
ment of  raw  materials  was  on  a  scale  which  anticipated  great 
expansion  of  the  manufacture  of  airplanes  in  1919  and  1920. 
And  so  we  can  go,  item  by  item,  through  the  list  of  sub-enter- 
prises in  the  aviation  project  and  find  that  we  received  great 
value  for  our  money  and  that  almost  the  only  wastes  were  the 
to-be-expected  war  wastes,  largely  due  to  our  unpreparedness 
for  war.  These  wastes  were  represented  in  the  high  prices  paid 
for  materials  produced  in  such  a  hurry  on  such  a  scale.  These 
high  unit  prices,  of  course,  took  care  of  the  cost  of  creating 
almost  the  whole  manufacturing  equipment  of  the  industry. 
However,  we  secured  the  materials. 

We  may  pause  here,  too,  to  correct  another  misapprehension 
which  has  had  some  currency:  namely,  that  not  only  was  a 
billion  shamefully  wasted  on  aircraft  but  it  was  wasted  by  the 
so-called  dollar-a-year  men  called  to  Washington  and  placed 


204  DEMOBILIZATION 

in  charge  of  the  aircraft  program.  The  only  dollar-a-year  men 
connected  with  that  program  in  a  conspicuous  capacity  were 
the  civilian  members  of  the  Aircraft  Board — Mr.  Howard  E. 
Coffin,  chairman,  and  Messrs.  Richard  F.  Howe  and  Harry  B. 
Thayer,  the  other  two  members.  But  the  Aircraft  Board  was 
advisory  only  in  function  and  possessed  absolutely  no  adminis- 
trative or  executive  powers.  It  acted  as  a  clearing  house  in  the 
effort  to  coordinate  the  aircraft  production  of  the  War  and 
Navy  departments.  The  actual  work  of  procuring  aircraft — 
designing,  contracting  for,  inspecting,  and  receiving  materials 
— was  always  in  the  hands  of  the  uniformed  services.  The  Air- 
craft Board  had  no  control  of  the  spending  of  appropriations, 
except  that  of  the  relatively  insignificant  appropriation  of 
$100,000  granted  to  it  by  Congress  to  cover  its  office  expenses. 

The  industry  which  wrote  the  records  of  aircraft  produc- 
tion was  attaining  great  momentum  when  the  armistice  was 
signed,  although  it  had  not  yet  reached  capacity  production. 
It  had,  however,  in  the  final  thirty-one  days  of  active  hostili- 
ties, produced  1,582  airplanes  (1,081  of  which  were  De  Havi- 
land  service  planes  for  use  in  France),  5,177  engines  (of  which 
3,034  were  Liberty  engines),  and  249  kite  balloons.  The  busi- 
ness of  terminating  this  industry  was  difficult.  The  liquidation 
plan  adopted  was  essentially  like  that  used  by  the  Ordnance 
Department.  Before  the  armistice  the  production  branch  of  the 
Air  Service  was  organized  into  eight  manufacturing  districts, 
with  headquarters  respectively  at  Boston,  Buffalo,  Chicago, 
Dayton,  Detroit,  New  York,  Pittsburg,  and  San  Francisco. 
Five  thousand  persons  were  employed  by  the  district  organiza- 
tions. After  the  armistice  the  district  production  boards  became 
district  claims  boards  for  the  Air  Service,  and  they  conducted 
most  of  the  actual  work  of  terminating  production  and  arrang- 
ing settlements  with  the  contractors.  Their  settlements  went 
up  for  approval,  first,  to  the  Air  Service  Claims  Board  and, 
finally,  to  the  War  Department  Claims  Board. 

The  air  service  contracts  outstanding  on  the  first  day  of  the 
armistice  obligated  the  Government  to  accept  completed  ma- 
terials to  the  value  of  $767,423,308.50.  Completed  materials 


AIRCRAFT  205 

and  raw  and  semi-finished  materials  accepted  by  the  Govern- 
ment in  the  settlement  with  the  contractors  after  the  armistice 
reached  a  value  of  $259,733,874.30.  Thus  the  contracts  and 
parts  of  contracts  terminated  in  the  liquidation  accounted  for 
a  cancellation  of  work-  to  the  value  of  $509,689,434.20.  In 
addition  to  accepting  and  paying  for  the  materials,  the  Govern- 
ment paid  in  cash  to  the  producers  in  settlement  of  their  claims 
the  sum  of  $94,013,776.51,  Hundreds  of  contractors  accepted 
the  statutory  $1.00  and  relieved  the  Government  of  all  finan- 
cial obligation. 

For  the  sole  or  leading  purpose  of  creating  reserves  for 
future  use  by  the  Army,  there  was  little  or  no  production  of 
air  supplies  after  the  armistice.  Leaving  aside  all  questions  of 
the  obsolescence  of  design,  no  major  class  of  military  supplies 
is  less  durable  in  storage  than  aircraft  materials.  Like  an  egg, 
an  airplane  or  a  balloon  cannot  be  slightly  bad.  and  still  be 
usable.  It  must  be  100-per-cent  perfect,  or  it  is  dangerous. 
The  life  of  rubber  is  short  even  under  the  most  favorable  condi- 
tions. The  rubber  in  balloon  fabric  does  not  escape  this  swift 
impairment.  The  rubber  tires  of  airplanes  deteriorate  with 
equal  rapidity.  The  laminated  and  glued  joints  of  the  wooden 
wing  beams  of  airplanes  expand,  contract,  and  work  loose  in  the 
varying  humidity  of  the  surrounding  air  and  are  soon  weak- 
ened below  the  safety  point.  Propellers  are  also  highly  sensi- 
tive to  changes  in  humidity  and  temperature.  Storage  batteries, 
when  stacked  together  in  storage,  wear  out  in  a  few  months, 
each  cell  apparently  working  upon  and  adversely  affecting  its 
neighbors.  Bolted  wing  cloth,  when  left  folded,  becomes  weak 
along  the  creases.  Of  all  aviation  supplies,  engines  are  the  least 
susceptible  to  deterioration  in  storage. 

In  view  of  these  considerations,  such  production  of  aircraft 
and  aviation  supplies  as  was  permitted  after  the  armistice  was 
undertaken  almost  solely  in  the  interest  of  the  contractors  and 
their  employees.  Most  of  the  factories  were  allowed  to  con- 
tinue in  operation  under  war  contracts  only  until  they  had  used 
up  materials  in  process  of  manufacture  when  the  armistice  was 
signed.  Even  this  operation  was  conducted  at  a  reduced  rate. 


2o6  DEMOBILIZATION 

The  airplane  contracts  had  called  for  a  delivery  of  27,000 
planes  in  all.  The  production  under  these  contracts,  in  exact 
figures,  amounted  to  11,754  planes  before  the  armistice  and 
1,732  afterwards,  a  total  of  13,486  airplanes  produced  by  the 
American  factories.  Contract  terminations  canceled  the  pro- 
duction of  about  an  equal  number. 

The  post-armistice  production  of  airplane  engines  was  some- 
what greater,  both  proportionately  and  in  numbers  of  units 
delivered.  This  was  due  partly  to  the  greater  momentum  ac- 
quired by  the  engine  project,  partly  to  the  fact  that  engines 
could  be  stored  safely  and  would  retain  good  military  value 
for  years  to  come,  and  partly  to  the  necessity  of  keeping  the 
engine  makers  at  work  while  their  factories  were  turning  to 
normal  production.  The  total  American  production  of  aviation 
engines  on  the  war  contracts  was  as  follows:  deliveries  to 
October  31,  1918,  28,509;  deliveries  thereafter,  13,081;  total 
war  production,  41,590.  Of  these  engines  20,493  were  Liberty 
engines,  of  which  about  5,000  were  produced  after  the  armi- 
stice. 

About  300  observation  balloons  were  produced  after  the 
armistice  before  the  manufacture  could  be  terminated. 

In  one  important  particular  the  policy  adopted  in  the  de- 
mobilization of  the  war  aircraft  industry  was  exactly  the  oppo- 
site of  that  used  in  demobilizing  the  ordnance  industry.  In 
working  back  to  a  peace  footing,  it  was  the  policy  of  the  Ord- 
nance Department  to  reserve  complete  manufacturing  equip- 
ments and  to  set  up  stand-by  plants  for  the  manufacture  of 
some  of  the  most  important  materials  in  ordnance  supply.  On 
the  other  hand,  in  demobilizing  the  airplane  industry  it  was  the 
policy  for  the  Government  not  to  retain  any  manufacturing 
facilities  whatsoever.  There  were  strong  strategic  reasons  be- 
hind both  these  policies.  For  field  guns,  for  recuperators,  for 
shell,  and  for  other  important  ordnance,  there  is  little  or  no 
normal  commercial  demand;  and  the  only  way  the  Ordnance 
Department  could  guarantee  the  future  existence  of  facilities 
for  producing  these  materials  was  to  retain  the  equipment 
created  during  the  war.  But  there  is,  or  can  be,  some  commer- 


AIRCRAFT  207 

cial  demand  for  airplanes,  and  some  day  there  will  undoubt- 
edly be  a  great  commercial  demand  for  them.  It  is  important 
to  the  military  welfare  of  the  United  States  that  this  country 
take  a  foremost  place  in  the  improvement  of  designs  and  in  the 
production  of  flying  machines  for  commercial  use.  Only 
through  the  development  of  a  great  independent  aircraft  in- 
dustry in  this  country  can  the  Government  be  assured  of  the 
existence  of  facilities  upon  which  it  can  rely  to  give  this  nation 
great  power  in  the  air.  As  conditions  now  are,  the  Government 
itself  must  be  the  chief  customer  of  the  airplane  industry,  and 
on  the  government  orders  the  industry  must  live  until  com- 
mercial flying  begins  to  develop  on  a  scale  comparable  at  least 
to  the  early  development  of  railway  transportation  in  the 
United  States.  If  the  Air  Service  were  to  have  retained  the  war 
manufacturing  facilities  as  government  producing  and  stand- 
by plants,  that  act  would  have  dealt  a  staggering  blow  to  the 
infant  commercial  industry  in  the  most  uncertain  period  of  its 
existence. 

Only  one  exception  was  made.  During  the  war  the  Wright- 
Martin  Aircraft  Corporation  developed  a  plant  in  Long  Island 
City  for  the  production  of  Hispano-Suiza  engines.  This  plant 
was  purchased  by  the  War  Department  and  is  being  retained 
as  a  stand-by  plant  under  the  name  of  the  United  States  Aero- 
nautical Engine  Plant.  The  future  of  this  establishment,  how- 
ever, is  uncertain. 

Although  it  ruthlessly  dispensed  with  the  war  manufactur- 
ing facilities,  the  Air  Service  retained  in  the  demobilization  a 
considerable  part  of  the  physical  plant  created  for  it  during 
the  war.  Of  the  twenty-six  flying  fields  used  in  the  training  of 
the  war  aviators,  six  have  been  retained  as  flying  fields.  These 
are  the  Boiling,  Langley,  Mather,  and  Kelly  flying  fields  and 
the  Carlstrom  and  March  pilot  training  fields.  The  present 
equipment  also  includes  three  balloon  schools,  three  balloon 
fields,  one  mechanics  school  (Chanute  Field),  one  observation 
school,  various  stations  for  the  defense  of  our  island  posses- 
sions and  for  the  patrol  of  the  Mexican  border,  nineteen  sup- 
ply, storage,  and  repair  depots,  and  various  other  stations. 


2o8  DEMOBILIZATION 

The  storage  of  reserve  supplies  retained  by  the  Air  Service 
afforded  some  interesting  problems,  since  nearly  every  class  of 
supplies  required  special  treatment  in  storage.  Engines,  for 
instance,  were  thoroughly  covered  inside  and  out  with  a  heavy 
rust-preventing  grease  compound  before  being  stored  away  in 
dry,  cool  concrete  warehouses.  Reserve  balloons  were  dusted 
with  talc,  rolled  carefully  so  as  to  put  as  little  weight  as  possi- 
ble on  creases  and  folds,  enclosed  in  sealed  rubber  envelopes, 
packed  in  wooden  chests,  which  were  then  sealed  up  so  as  to  be 
practically  waterproof  and  air-tight,  and  then  stacked  in  dry 
rooms  in  which  air  at  a  medium  temperature  circulates  con- 
stantly among  the  chests.  Even  so,  no  long  life  for  the  balloons 
is  expected.  Wing  fabric,  both  cotton  and  linen,  was  unbolted, 
rolled  upon  cardboard  tubes,  wrapped  in  paper,  and  suspended 
on  racks  in  rooms  heated  in  winter.  Aviators'  fur  and  woolen 
clothing  was  stored  in  fly-proof  and  moth-proof  tar-paper-lined 
rooms,  the  floors  of  which  were  thickly  covered  with  naphtha- 
line. Fabric  was  stripped  from  airplane  wings  before  storage  in 
order  to  permit  the  free  ventilation  of  the  wood;  glued  joints 
were  given  an  extra  coat  of  varnish;  all  metal  parts  were 
painted  with  red  lead  or  white  lead ;  and  the  wings  were  stored 
in  racks  designed  to  keep  their  edges  straight.  Thousands  of 
propellers  were  stored  at  the  aviation  supply  depot  at  Middle- 
town,  Pennsylvania,  in  a  room  in  which  moisture  sprayers 
maintain  a  constant  humidity  and  a  thermostat  a  constant 
temperature. 

The  aircraft  contractors'  claims  proved  to  be  fairly  easy  to 
adjust  except  one,  the  so-called  castor  bean  case.  This  proved 
to  be  one  of  the  most  vexing  settlements  which  came  before 
the  War  Department  Claims  Board.  From  its  humble  position 
as  an  unwelcome  medicament  of  the  nursery,  castor  oil  jumped 
during  the  war  to  the  eminence  of  being  an  indispensable  lubri- 
cant for  the  rotary  engines  used  in  driving  airplanes.  The 
prospective  demand  in  1918  for  castor  oil  far  outstripped  the 
world  supply.  We  needed  6,000,000  gallons  by  July,  1919. 
The  Air  Service  therefore  took  the  unprecedented  step  of  at- 
tempting to  grow  castor  beans  in  America,  although  castor 


AIRCRAFT  209 

beans,  in  merchantable  quantities,  had  never  been  grown  here 
before.  Still,  in  the  Southern  States  we  had  the  correct  climate, 
and  no  obstacle  seemed  to  stand  in  the  way  of  a  successful 
crop. 

Accordingly,  through  twenty-three  prime  contractors,  the 
Air  Service  arranged  with  some  12,000  southern  farmers  to 
plant  castor  beans  in  100,000  acres  of  land.  Glittering  pros- 
pects were  held  forth :  thirty  bushels  an  acre  was  only  an  aver- 
age yield,  and  the  Government  would  pay  handsomely  for  the 
beans.  Thus  castor  beans  won  100,000  acres  of  good  American 
soil  away  from  rice,  cotton,  and  corn,  even  at  the  war  prices 
of  these  commodities.  About  planting-time  in  1918  all  was 
ready — fields,  husbandmen,  and  tools — all  except  seed.  After 
all,  the  farmers  had  to  have  seed ;  and  to  get  seed  the  Govern- 
ment seized  a  cargo  of  castor  beans  from  India,  originally 
committed  to  a  more  sinister  purpose.  These  beans  the  Gov- 
ernment distributed  among  the  12,000  prospective  producers, 
who  planted  them;  and  then,  as  the  cartoonist  so  aptly  says, 
the  fun  began. 

Certain  of  the  growers,  like  suburban  gardeners,  watched 
for  bean  shoots  that  never  appeared.  Some  of  these  alien  beans 
seemed  to  derive  a  sort  of  floral  madness  from  the  heady  gulf 
loam  and  sent  up  veritable  trunks  twenty,  thirty,  and  forty  feet 
in  air.  But  never  a  bean  pod  crowned  such  luxuriant  growth. 
Whether  because  of  the  growers'  lack  of  experience,  unfavor- 
able climate,  or,  more  likely,  defective  seed,  there  has  seldom 
been  an  American  crop  failure  more  nearly  total  than  this.  By 
gleaning  every  bean,  the  producers  managed  to  gather  181,000 
bushels,  or  l  .8  bushels  to  the  acre. 

As  soon  as  the  fell  result  was  known,  12,000  angry  farmers 
besieged  the  Government  with  demands  for  reparation.  The 
claims  aggregated  millions.  Not  only  did  the  farmers  hold  the 
Government  responsible  for  the  crop  loss,  but  they  also,  dozens 
of  them,  put  in  claims  for  property  damage  and  restoration 
costs,  maintaining  that  in  clearing  their  lands  after  the  bean 
crop  they  had  had  to  use  stump  pullers  and  dynamite  to  rout 
out  the  enormous  stalks.  One  farmer  sarcastically  credited  the 


2 1  o  DEMOBILIZATION 

War  Department  with  his  winter's  supply  of  firewood,  which 
he  said  he  had  been  able  to  cut  from  his  bean  patch.  The  War 
Department  finally  settled  the  claims  for  a  total  of  $1,540,- 
638,  which  was  at  the  rate  of  $8.50  a  bushel  for  the  beans 
received.  Thus  ended  the  first  lesson  in  the  American  cultiva- 
tion of  the  castor  bean.  It  will  be  some  time  yet  before  the 
Department  of  Agriculture  will  have  to  create  a  branch  to 
gather  statistics  on  the  domestic  castor  bean  crop. 

The  work  of  demobilizing  the  Air  Service  of  the  American 
Expeditionary  Forces  ramified  into  several  main  branches: 
the  cancellation  of  our  foreign  contracts  and  the  settlement  of 
our  accounts  with  the  governments  of  the  Allies  arising  from 
the  mutual  purchases  of  materials;  the  sale  of  the  installations 
and  surplus  movable  property  acquired  by  the  Service  during 
the  war;  the  salvaging  of  worn-out  equipment;  and  the  ship- 
ment to  the  United  States  of  airplanes  and  other  equipment 
retained  by  the  Air  Service  for  future  use.  Most  of  the  surplus 
property  of  the  Air  Serv^ice  abroad  went  to  France  in  the  bulk 
sale  of  all  surplus  A.  E.  F.  property,  although  some  was  taken 
by  other  governments  in  Europe  in  smaller  purchases.  These 
sales  were  consummated  by  the  United  States  Liquidation 
Commission,  which  also  concluded  the  financial  settlements  of 
our  air  service  accounts  with  the  Allied  governments.  These 
transactions  are  to  be  explained  in  some  detail  in  a  later 
chapter.  The  disposition  of  all  aircraft  materials  retained  by 
the  A.  E.  F.  was  accomplished  by  the  Air  Service  itself. 

The  A.  E.  F.'s  production  center  before  the  armistice  had 
been  at  the  great  flying  field  at  Romorantin,  near  Tours.  Here 
all  new  airplanes  acquired  by  the  A.  E.  F.,  either  from  the 
American  industry  or  from  the  factories  in  Europe,  had  been 
received,  assembled,  equipped,  and  dispatched  to  the  front. 
It  had  taken  more  than  10,000  officers  and  enlisted  men  to  do 
this  work.  After  the  armistice  Romorantin  was  made  the  con- 
centration depot  for  all  American  air  service  supplies  in  France, 
and  here  all  materials  for  return  to  the  United  States  were 
boxed  and  forwarded  to  the  ports.  About  1,000  airplane  en- 
gines were  shipped  to  the  United  States  and  2,097  planes,  of 


AIRCRAFT  211 

which  347  were  German,  1,139  British  and  French,  and  611 
American  De  Havilands. 

Merely  the  packing  of  this  equipment  was  a  work  of  great 
size.  It  required,  for  instance,  7,500,000  board  feet  of  seasoned 
lumber  for  the  crates,  besides  large  quantities  of  nails,  bolts, 
clamps,  wire  cable,  paint,  and  roofing  paper,  and  also  tools  for 
the  packers.  A  lumber  mill  employing  195  operatives  was  set 
up  merely  to  resaw,  tongue,  and  groove  the  lumber  for  boxes 
and  crates. 

The  2,000  airplanes  returned  to  the  United  States  repre- 
sented practically  all  of  the  great  aerial  equipment  of  the 
A.  E.  F.  which  was  saved  for  use  after  the  war.  The  sales  of 
our  used  airplanes  abroad  after  the  armistice,  to  either  govern- 
ments or  individuals,  were  practically  nothing.  The  remaining 
thousands  of  airplanes  which  had  once  borne  the  American 
insignia  aloft  were  stripped  of  their  salvageable  materials  and 
burned  in  great  bonfires,  the  pyres  of  original  investments 
running  up  into  millions  of  dollars.  This  seeming  profligacy 
was  harshly  criticized  by  those  in  this  country  who  did  not 
understand  the  conditions;  but,  when  those  responsible  for 
the  destruction  had  put  in  their  defense,  the  criticism  ceased. 

The  life  of  airplanes  in  use  or  in  storage  is  short  at  best. 
Thousands  of  the  A.  E.  F.  planes  had  given  considerable  serv- 
ice, either  at  the  training  fields  or  at  the  front.  The  average 
life  expectancy  of  these  ships  was  probably  less  than  three 
months.  There  was  no  sale  for  them  abroad — France  already 
owned  many  more  airplanes  than  she  could  possibly  use  up, 
and  the  attempts  of  the  Air  Service  to  sell  used  planes  to  indi- 
viduals ended  in  complete  failure.  To  knock  down  these  ma- 
chines, box  them,  subject  them  once  more  to  the  deteriorating 
effects  of  the  salt  humidity  of  a  transatlantic  voyage,  and  to 
reassemble  them  in  the  United  States,  would  still  further 
impair  their  condition  and  still  further  abbreviate  their  average 
life.  There  was  also  to  be  considered  the  expense  of  maintain- 
ing soldiers  in  France  to  protect  this  materiel  for  several 
months,  the  expense  of  preparing  it  for  shipment,  and  finally, 
— the  chief  cost, — the  expense  of  transporting  it  to  the  United 


2 1 2  DEMOBILIZATION 

States.  The  question  was  whether  it  was  good  business  to  spend 
all  this  money  for  the  sake  of  returning  to  the  United  States 
materials  which  at  best  would  have  a  useful  life  of  only  a  few 
weeks,  and  which,  because  of  the  surpluses  of  new  or  little  used 
airplanes  already  on  hand,  might  never  be  used  at  all.  The  War 
Department  did  not  hesitate  in  its  answer.  It  ordered  the  sale 
or  destruction  of  all  A.  E.  F.  airplanes  of  this  class;  and,  since 
sale  proved  to  be  impossible,  the  order  meant  their  destruction. 
Those  in  charge  of  the  work,  realizing  that  criticism  would 
be  likely  to  follow,  proceeded  most  carefully.  Only  the  newest, 
least  used,  and  best  conditioned  planes  were  reserved  for  ship- 
ment home.  The  air  squadrons  with  the  Army  of  Occupation 
were  given  a  plentiful  supply  of  airplanes.  The  rest,  destined 
for  destruction,  were  given  several  inspections  by  different 
committees  and  boards  of  survey,  in  order  that  the  Chief  of 
the  Air  Service  might  have  a  plentitude  of  expert  opinion  on 
which  to  base  his  condemnation  orders. 

The  Class  D  material,  as  this  condemned  property  was 
called,  was  concentrated  in  three  centers — Romorantin,  Issou- 
dun  (where  the  A.  E.  F.  had  operated  the  largest  flying  school 
in  the  world),  and  Colombey-les-Belles  (the  demobilization 
depot  for  the  zone  of  advance).  Here  were  conducted  the  final 
inspections.  Many  of  the  condemned  planes  presented,  to  the 
unpracticed  eye,  a  perfect  appearance.  Storage  space  in  the  zone 
of  advance  after  the  armistice  had  always  been  short,  and  these 
apparently  good  machines  had  suffered  from  exposure  to  the 
weather.  They  were  water-soaked;  glued  joints  had  given 
away,  wooden  parts  were  warped,  and  so  on.  They  would  have 
had  to  be  completely  rebuilt  to  be  safe.  Others  had  broken 
struts  and  cross  braces  and  other  damaged  parts.  All  such 
machines  were  set  aside  for  salvage. 

The  condemned  airplanes  then  passed  from  crew  to  crew, 
who  dismantled  them.  All  miscellaneous  metal  parts  were 
stripped  out  and  sent  to  the  quartermaster  depots  for  sale  as 
junk  metal.  Engines  were  removed  and  saved,  as  were  also  pro- 
pellers, landing  gears,  wheels,  tires,  axles,  cowls,  gas  tanks  and 
oil  tanks,  controls,  instruments,  radio  apparatus,  machine  guns, 


Photo  from  Air  Service 

AMERICAN  AIRPLANE  WRECKAGE 


Photo  from  Air  Service 


FUEL  FOR  THE  BONFIRE 


1 

Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

GERMAN  LOCOMOTIVE  TAKEN  OVER  BY  A.  E.  F.  ENGINEERS 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

ENGINEERS  CONSTRUCTING  BEAUNE  UNIVERSITY 


AIRCRAFT  213 

bomb  racks,  and  many  other  serviceable  articles.  Even  complete 
wings,  when  in  good  condition,  were  removed  and  packed  for 
shipment  to  the  United  States.  The  remaining  debris,  consisting 
of  little  more  than  the  highly  inflammable  wooden  construction 
members  and  dope-covered  wing  fabric,  was  piled  in  great 
heaps  and  burned.  More  than  2,300  airplanes  were  thus  dis- 
posed of. 

One  hundred  observation  balloons  were  ripped  up  and  used 
for  tarpaulins,  wagon  covers,  and  the  like.  The  rest  of  the 
A.  E.  F.  balloons  were  returned  to  the  United  States. 

Airdromes  on  leased  lands,  occupied  by  small  aviation  units 
of  the  A.  E.  F.,  were  turned  back  to  the  owners  of  the  property 
after  troops  had  dismantled  all  the  war  structures.  With  the 
exception  of  these,  the  entire  plant  equipment  of  the  Air  Serv- 
ice in  France,  consisting  of  training  stations,  observation 
schools,  supply  depots,  and  the  like,  was  taken  over  by  the 
French  Government.  The  American  surplus  of  aircraft  in  Eng- 
land was  disposed  of  by  the  British  Government,  acting  as 
agent  for  the  United  States. 


CHAPTER  XIV 
TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES 

THE  demobilization  problem  of  the  Corps  of  Engineers 
was  a  two-branched  one  in  that,  while  the  Engineers 
had  purchased  heavily  of  supplies  in  the  United  States, 
they  had  used  those  supplies  principally  in  France,  where  also 
they  had  placed  contracts  for  the  delivery  of  large  quantities 
of  engineering  materials  which  it  was  not  expedient  to  ship  to 
the  A.  E.  F.  from  the  United  States.  When  the  armistice  came, 
it  found  great  engineering  production  projects  well  advanced 
both  in  this  country  and  abroad,  large  surpluses  of  materials  on 
hand  on  both  sides  of  the  ocean,  and  in  France  an  enormous 
activity  in  the  construction  of  buildings  and  other  more  or  less 
permanently  installed  facilities  for  the  expedition.  In  France 
the  Engineer  Corps  was  charged  with  the  duty  of  building 
docks,  port  terminal  facilities,  storage  depots,  hospitals,  bar- 
racks, railroads,  and  other  equipment  for  the  Army,  as  well  as 
that  of  building  roads  and  bridges,  tunneling  out  mines,  and 
stringing  wire  for  the  troops  at  the  front.  It  was  the  job  of  the 
Engineers  after  the  armistice  to  terminate  this  whole  vast 
business,  closing  out  the  contracts,  settling  with  the  contractors, 
disposing  of  surplus  supplies,  and  storing  reserves  for  possible 
use  by  a  future  army  of  large  size. 

At  the  time  of  the  armistice  the  Engineers  were  engaged  on 
more  than  600  separate  construction  projects  in  France.  The 
work  on  246  of  these  was  stopped  immediately,  and  the  only 
permitted  post-armistice  construction  was  that  of  facilities  to 
be  used  during  the  demobilization  of  the  A.  E.  F.  These  can- 
cellations accounted  for  a  saving  of  $135,000,000.  The  can- 
cellations included  projects  for  the  construction  of  450  miles  of 
railroad.  Contracts  with  French  producers  of  engineering  ma- 
terials were  canceled  to  the  value  of  $30,000,000.  In  settling 


TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES  215 

with  the  contractors  the  Engineers  followed  the  principle  that 
the  American  Government  would  compensate  the  foreign 
producers  for  all  losses  sustained  by  them,  but  would  pay  no 
anticipated  profits.  Eventually  the  French  contractors'  claims 
were  settled  by  the  payment  of  less  than  $1,500,000.  Purchase 
orders  placed  with  French  producers,  calling  for  the  delivery 
of  materials  worth  about  $13,000,000,  were  canceled  and 
settled  for  less  than  $90,000,  of  which  sum  about  $60,000  was 
paid  for  supplies  accepted  in  the  settlement. 

The  Engineers  in  France  found  considerable  constructive 
work  to  do  after  the  armistice.  There  were  camps  to  be  built 
at  the  American  ports  of  embarkation  in  France,  nearly  10,000 
miles  of  roads  to  be  repaired,  and  schools,  theatres,  and  athletic 
fields,  including  the  Pershing  Stadium  near  Paris,  to  be  con- 
structed. These,  and  the  installations  put  in  before  the  armi- 
stice, constituted  for  the  A.  E.  F.  a  physical  equipment  on 
which  the  American  Government  had  spent  hundreds  of  mil- 
lions of  dollars;  yet  after  the  return  of  the  Expeditionary 
Forces,  the  physical  installation  in  France,  taken  as  a  whole, 
was  more  of  an  embarrassment  to  the  United  States  than  an 
asset.  Some  of  the  railroads,  docks,  and  other  great  pieces  of 
construction  work  undoubtedly  possessed  great  inherent  future 
value  to  the  French,  and  we  could  expect  to  be  well  paid  for 
turning  them  over  to  the  French  Government;  but  as  an  offset 
there  were  scores  of  installations  of  no  peace-time  value  at  all 
— roads,  military  railroads,  and  vast  camps  of  flimsy  construc- 
tion built  upon  fertile  farm  lands.  The  obligation  was  upon  the 
A.  E.  F.  to  restore  these  occupied  French  lands  to  their  original 
condition;  but  there  were  approximately  50,000  acres  of 
French  farms  so  occupied,  and  to  have  restored  this  land  would 
have  taken  the  time  of  30,000  men  for  several  years. 

The  great  reserves  of  engineering  supplies  in  France,  as  con- 
trasted with  permanent  installations,  were  indeed  an  asset,  but 
not  so  much  of  an  asset  as  one  would  think.  In  the  first  place, 
to  sell  them  to  private  buyers  in  the  European  markets  would 
have  been  a  work  of  several  years,  during  which  time  the 
American  Government  would  have  had  to  maintain  in  France 


2 1 6  DEMOBILIZATION 

a  force  of  perhaps  5,000  men.  Moreover,  all  that  time  the 
engineering  stores  would  have  been  constantly  deteriorating, 
so  that  their  average  value  would  not  have  been  nearly  so 
great  as  their  value  at  the  time  of  the  armistice. 

These  were  the  considerations  which  led  to  the  decision  to 
dispose  of  all  American  engineering  facilities  in  France,  both 
supplies  and  permanent  or  semi-permanent  installations,  in 
one  blanket,  lump-sum  deal  with  the  French  Government.  The 
installations  went  to  the  French  at  a  price  difficult  to  fix 
exactly,  because  in  this  same  bargain  was  included  all  other 
A.  E.  F.  property  not  returned  to  the  United  States  and  not 
sold  to  other  foreign  countries,  the  French  paying  the  flat  price 
of  $400,000,000  for  the  whole  lot.  It  is  estimated  that  the 
American  army  installations  in  France  accounted  for  $32,000,- 
000  of  the  total  sum  paid.  If  we  accept  that  figure,  then  we 
must  call  it  a  good  bargain;  for  the  French  Government  also 
assumed  our  obligations  to  the  French  property  owners,  thus 
relieving  us  of  the  work  of  restoring  their  farms  to  usable  con- 
dition, ripping  out  the  plumbing  and  other  modern  con- 
veniences with  which  we  had  profaned  some  of  their  most 
ancient  chateaux  and  monasteries,  and  doing  a  thousand  simi- 
lar tasks,  or,  in  lieu  of  such  work,  paying  to  the  owners  the 
cost  of  the  restoration  in  cash. 

The  few  engineering  supplies  accumulated  by  the  Americans 
in  England  were  sold  to  individual  buyers.  Enemy  engineering 
materiel  captured  in  France  by  the  A.  E.  F.  went  to  France 
in  the  lump-sum  sale.  In  Belgium  the  captured  ??iateriel  con- 
sisted principally  of  lumber  and  sawmill  equipment,  worth 
about  $250,000,  and  this  went  to  Belgium  to  pay  that  country 
for  assuming  the  liability  for  the  German  ammunition  cap- 
tured by  our  forces  in  Belgium. 

It  was  the  policy,  because  of  the  scarcity  of  shipping,  to 
return  no  heavy  engineering  supplies  to  the  United  States,  but 
to  bring  back  such  light  technical  equipment  as  searchlights, 
flash-ranging  and  sound-ranging  devices,  instruments,  and  the 
like.  It  was,  however,  expedient  to  return  large  quantities  of 
steel  rails  and  beams,  because  these  could  serve  as  ballast  in 


TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES  217 

ships;  and  the  Government  also  ordered  the  return  of  a  large 
quantity  of  road-building  machinery  for  the  use  of  the  Bureau 
of  Public  Roads.  The  Engineers  saw  to  it  that  samples  of  most 
of  the  engineering  equipment  used  by  other  armies  in  the 
World  War  were  shipped  to  the  United  States  for  study  here. 

The  property  bargain  with  France  disposed  of  everything 
except  two  large  claims  against  the  United  States :  one  for  the 
American  use  of  the  French  railroads,  and  the  other  for  the 
damage  wrought  by  the  A.  E.  F.'s  lumbering  operations  in  the 
French  forests.  The  railroad  claim  was  most  intricate  and  com- 
plicated because  of  the  inaccuracy  of  the  records  and  for  other 
reasons,  but  it  was  finally  settled  in  full  by  allowing  the 
French  Government  a  credit  of  about  $61,000,000  (435,000,- 
000  francs  valued  at  seven  to  the  dollar).  The  forestry  claim 
was  settled  by  allowing  the  French  a  credit  of  $10,000,000, 

The  claims  of  French  contractors  who  had  supplied  us  with 
engineering  materials  were  settled,  along  with  nearly  all  other 
French  contractors'  claims,  by  the  United  States  Liquidation 
Commission  in  a  blanket  negotiation  with  the  French  Govern- 
ment. One  engineering  claim,  however,  remained  unsettled. 
The  contractor  had  agreed  to  supply  6,000  demountable  bar- 
racks to  the  A.  E.  F.,  but  he  had  delivered  no  buildings  by  the 
beginning  of  the  armistice  and  had  made  little  progress  in  his 
contract.  Nevertheless,  he  presented  a  claim  for  damages 
amounting  to  $600,000.  The  Liquidation  Commission  offered 
him  $1,200,  and  he  refused  it.  His  itemized  costs  included 
purchases  of  liquors,  ladies'  dressing  tables,  and  oriental  rugs, 
and  he  even  admitted  orally  that  one  of  his  "costs"  was  a 
mysterious  payment  of  $4,000  to  a  French  interpreter  in  the 
office  of  the  American  engineer  purchasing  officer  in  France. 

On  the  first  day  of  the  armistice  there  were  nearly  200,000 
tons  of  engineering  war  materials  produced  and  on  hand  in 
the  United  States  and  awaiting  shipment  to  France,  This 
accumulation  was  worth  $31,000,000.  It  included  hundreds 
of  locomotives,  thousands  of  cars,  and  tens  of  thousands  of 
tons  of  track  materials,  building  materials,  general  machinery, 
and  tools.  Meanwhile  the  American  contracts  for  the  produc- 


2i8  DEMOBILIZATION 

tion  of  such  supplies  had  reached  a  value  of  upwards  of 
$365,000,000,  and  production  had  reached  such  rates  as  300 
locomotives  and  1,800  railway  cars  a  month.  This  business  was 
terminated  with  the  utmost  rapidity  which  was  consistent  with 
the  manufacturer's  need  to  convert  his  factory  to  other  work 
without  undue  disturbance  to  his  labor  force,  and  with  the 
Government's  need  to  acquire  adequate  military  reserves  of 
such  supplies  and  to  realize  most  on  the  money  which  it  had 
invested  in  the  enterprise. 

When  the  war  industry  came  to  an  end,  the  War  Depart- 
ment thus  found  on  its  hands  great  quantities  of  engineering 
supplies.  Some  of  these  supplies,  such  as  cranes  and  road-build- 
ing supplies,  were  turned  over  to  other  departments  of  the 
Government  for  use  in  public  works.  Up  to  May  15,  1920, 
engineering  equipment  and  supplies  had  been  sold  on  the 
market  with  a  gross  cash  return  of  over  $110,000,000.  Since 
the  cost  of  these  materials  had  been  about  $128,000,000,  the 
sales  return  was  about  85  per  cent  of  the  cost,  an  extraor- 
dinarily high  recovery  rate.  Foreign  governments  were  heavy 
purchasers,  particularly  of  railroad  locomotives  and  cars.  The 
Engineers  reserved  from  sale  and  stored  in  various  interior 
depots  an  immense  reserve  of  supplies  for  possible  future 
military  use.  The  principal  items  in  this  reserve  are  as  follows : 

*197  Consolidation-type  locomotives. 
*12,750  Cars,  including  gondolas,  flat,  box,  tank,  and  dump  cars. 
736  Track-miles  of  standard-gauge  railway  materials. 
353  Track-miles  of  light  railway  materials. 
35  Divisions  of  heavy  ponton  bridge  equipment. 
6  Divisions  of  light  ponton  bridge  equipment. 
•{■67  Divisions  of  unit  equipment. 
81   60-inch  open-type  searchlight  units  (Cadillac  trucks). 
154  36-inch  barrel-type  searchlight  units  (Mack  trucks). 
1   Sound-ranging  set. 
10  Bull-Tucker  recording  sets. 
25  Flash-ranging  sets. 
35  Ground-ranging  sets. 

*  Includes  surplus  for  sale. 

t  Sufficient  to  equip  engineer  troops  with  army  of  825,000  men. 


TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES  219 

The  financial  liquidation  of  the  American  war  business  of 
the  Engineers  was  unusually  satisfactory,  both  because  of  the 
celerity  with  which  it  was  carried  out  and  because  of  the  low 
cost  of  its  termination  to  the  Government.  Shortly  before  the 
armistice  many  of  the  most  important  purchasing  activities  of 
the  Engineers  were  transferred  to  the  Director  of  Purchase, 
Storage,  and  Traffic,  except  that  the  Chief  of  Engineers  con- 
tinued to  buy  railroad  equipment  and  several  other  sorts  of 
heavy  materials  and  also  searchlights  and  ranging  apparatus. 
After  the  armistice  the  engineering  contracts  were  consequently 
terminated  and  settled  by  two  agencies — the  Engineers  them- 
selves and  the  Division  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic.  The 
Engineer  Claims  Board  was  created  to  liquidate  the  war  engi- 
neering industry  for  the  Corps  of  Engineers,  acting,  however, 
as  subsidiary  to  the  War  Department  Claims  Board.  By  May 
15,  1920,  the  Engineer  Claims  Board  had  settled  up  finally 
168  of  its  total  of  171  war  claims.  These  claims  accounted  for 
a  total  war  business  amounting  to  $238,000,000.  Production 
after  the  armistice  resulted  in  the  delivery  of  supplies  worth 
$17,000,000,  which  the  War  Department  paid  for  at  the 
contract  prices.  The  terminations  equaled  $218,500,000  in 
amount,  and  for  this  termination  the  Government  had  to  pay 
in  cancellation  costs  only  a  little  more  than  $1,850,000,  or 
less  than  1  per  cent  of  the  original  obligation. 

The  orders  for  engineering  supplies  taken  over  by  the  Di- 
rector of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic  amounted  to  $138,- 
000,000.  A  considerable  part  of  this  production  was  allowed 
to  go  through  to  completion,  and  some  of  the  business  was 
transferred  to  other  branches  of  the  War  Department  for 
settlement.  The  Director  of  Purchase  and  Storage  terminated 
entirely  business  amounting  to  $29,600,000  and  paid  in  ter- 
mination charges  $2,800,000 — about  9  per  cent  of  the  original 
obligation. 

One  engineer  contractor,  a  builder  of  locomotives,  whose 
contracts  were  $55,000,000  in  amount,  canceled  the  entire 
business  without  cost  to  the  Government. 


220  DEMOBILIZATION 

CHEMICAL  WARFARE  MATERIALS 

The  annistice  and  the  order  to  begin  demobilization  played 
havoc  for  a  time  with  the  Chemical  Warfare  Service,  for  the 
first  assumption  was  that  the  use  of  poisonous  gases  in  warfare 
had  originated  and  been  developed  in,  and  would  end  with, 
the  World  War.  On  November  29,  1918,  the  Director  of  the 
Chemical  Warfare  Service  received  an  official  notice  that  "the 
amount  of  such  [chemical  warfare]  equipment  for  the  needs 
of  the  Army  after  the  passing  of  the  present  emergency  will  be 
zero."  The  gas-mask  production  division  of  the  Chemical  War- 
fare Service  was  a  highly  organized  and  highly  efficient  body, 
and  so  rapidly  did  it  work  after  the  armistice  that  it  succeeded 
in  dismantling  its  gas-mask  manufacturing  plants  and  selling 
almost  all  the  machinery  before  Congress  blocked  the  plan 
and,  with  new  legislation,  made  the  Chemical  Warfare  Service 
a  permanent  branch  of  the  regular  military  establishment. 
The  gas  production  division  of  the  Service,  however,  was  not 
so  precipitate,  and  it  retained  the  facilities  acquired  during  the 
war  for  the  production  of  poison  gases  and  chemicals. 

The  Gas  Defense  Division,  which  produced  the  gas  masks 
and  other  defensive  equipment,  largely  did  its  own  manufactur- 
ing ;  but  it  contracted  extensively  for  the  materials  used  in  the 
manufacture.  On  the  day  of  the  armistice  its  outstanding  con- 
tracts amounted  to  $5,000,000.  By  the  end  of  the  year  1918, 
or  less  than  eight  weeks  later,  these  contracts  had  been  reduced 
by  terminations  to  about  $150,000.  The  sales  of  surplus  ma- 
terials brought  in  about  $8,000,000.  The  termination  of  the 
production  of  gas  masks  at  the  two  great  plants  on  Long  Island 
was  guided  entirely  by  the  best  interests  of  the  thousands  of 
employees,  not  one  of  whom  was  discharged  until  one  of  the 
official  employment  agencies  had  found  a  place  for  him  in 
commercial  life.  In  six  months  the  demobilization  of  this 
branch  of  the  Chemical  Warfare  Service  was  complete. 

So  far  as  the  employees  were  concerned,  the  demobilization 
of  the  gas-making  industry  was  not  a  difficult  problem.  All  the 
plants  were  owned  by  the  Government,  and  most  of  the  opera- 
tives were  enlisted  men  in  uniform.  Moreover,  for  nearly  a 


TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES  221 

month  before  the  armistice  there  had  been  almost  a  complete 
suspension  of  the  manufacture  of  war  gas,  due  to  a  shortage 
of  shell  to  be  filled  with  gas. 

The  War  Department's  equipment  for  making  gas  consisted 
of  the  Edgewood  Arsenal  and  a  number  of  subsidiary  plants 
located  in  various  parts  of  the  country.  The  Edgewood  Arsenal 
was  retained,  at  first  in  stand-by  condition,  with  all  machinery 
cleaned  and  oiled,  all  outdoor  equipment  housed  in  safe  stor- 
age, and  all  surfaces  subject  to  deterioration  painted.  The  sub- 
sidiary plants,  buildings,  and  equipment,  were  sold,  princi- 
pally to  manufacturers  of  chemicals  and  dyes.  The  sales  were 
conducted  by  the  auction  method,  and  the  Government  re- 
ceived good  prices. 

Even  some  of  the  experts  in  the  Chemical  Warfare  Service 
accepted  the  common,  but,  as  it  proved,  erroneous,  opinion 
after  the  armistice  that  the  great  quantities  of  war  gases  accu- 
mulated by  this  nation  and  others  during  the  war  would  be  a 
dangerous  menace  as  long  as  they  were  in  storage,  and  that 
they  would  have  to  be  destroyed,  presumably  by  being  dumped 
into  the  sea.  These  poisons  were  supposed  to  be  so  corrosive  in 
their  action  that  no  metal  containers  would  hold  them  long. 
Since  large  quantities  of  the  war  gases  on  hand  after  the  armi- 
stice were  loaded  into  steel  shell,  it  was  assumed  that  these 
shell  and  their  contents  would  be  a  dead  loss,  except,  perhaps, 
for  some  slight  salvage  value. 

Events  after  the  armistice  seemed  to  strengthen  this  impres- 
sion. Leakage,  for  instance,  was  undoubtedly  occurring  in  the 
gas  shell  stored  in  our  shell  dumps  in  France;  and  it  was  dan- 
gerous for  unmasked  men  to  work  around  some  of  these  dumps. 
An  even  more  convincing  demonstration  of  the  instability  of 
loaded  gas  projectiles  was  given  accidentally  at  Edgewood 
Arsenal  after  the  armistice.  Among  the  war  stocks  there  de- 
clared surplus  was  one  consignment  of  500,000  hand  grenades 
loaded  with  stannic  chloride,  a  smoke-producing  chemical. 
These  had  been  returned  from  France,  and  they  were  un- 
doubtedly in  poor  condition.  On  the  voyage  from  France  the 
chemical  had  begun  to  eat  holes  through  the  metal   of  the 


222  DEMOBILIZATION 

grenades,  and  several  thousand  of  the  grenades  had  had  to  be 
thrown  overboard.  The  Chemical  Warfare  Service  sold  these 
grenades  to  a  chemical  company.  When  a  locomotive  backed 
down  to  couple  to  the  cars  containing  the  grenades,  the  slight 
jar  exploded  fully  half  the  missiles,  and  nobody  could  go  near 
that  sidetrack  for  two  or  three  days. 

This  incident  apparently  showed  the  impermanency  of  war 
gases.  Actually  it  demonstrated  the  impermanency  only  of 
stannic  chloride,  which  is  highly  corrosive  to  metal ;  and  stannic 
chloride,  in  the  quantities  produced,  was  a  relatively  unim- 
portant war  chemical.  Nevertheless,  in  the  fear  that  other  more 
highly  toxic  gases  would  also  corrode  and  eat  through  their 
containers,  the  Chemical  Warfare  Service  dumped  into  the 
ocean  some  twenty  tons  of  phosgene  and  a  large  quantity  of 
mustard-gas  shell.  This  was  probably  sheer  waste,  as  it  proved, 
because  subsequent  experimentation  established  the  fact  that 
the  most  deadly  of  the  war  gases  could  be  safely  stored  for 
years  if  all  water  moisture  were  driven  from  the  chemicals 
themselves  and  all  air  exhausted  from  the  containers,  leaving 
only  the  pure  chemicals  in  contact  with  the  metal  of  the  con- 
tainers. Corrosion  was  found  to  be  due  to  the  presence  of 
moisture  within  the  containers. 

Nearly  1,400  tons  of  phosgene,  chlorpicrin,  mustard,  and 
other  deadly  gases  made  during  the  war  are  now  stored  at  Edge- 
wood;  and  to-day,  nearly  three  years  after  the  armistice,  their 
containers  are  still  in  almost  perfect  condition.  It  is  estimated 
that  they  will  not  deteriorate  in  storage  for  at  least  ten  years, 
a  fact  indicating  that  poison  gases  are  as  durable  in  storage  as 
smokeless  powder.  There  are  also  stored  at  Edgewood  large 
quantities  of  loaded  gas  shell  manufactured  during  the  war. 
These  are  frequently  inspected  and  tested,  and  the  tests  show 
that  they  are  keeping  well.  The  experts  now  estimate  that 
loaded  gas  shell  will  exist  in  good  condition  as  long  as  a  battle- 
ship can  give  service,  from  the  time  of  commissioning  the  ship 
to  the  time  when  it  is  declared  obsolete. 

Other  reserves  of  chemical  warfare  equipment  now  stored 
at  Edgewood  include   51,000  Livens  projectors,   88   trench 


TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES  223 

mortars,  3,000,000  unfilled  gas  shell,  and  700,000  unfilled 
hand  grenades.  There  are  also  in  storage  over  2,000,000  gas 
masks  and  1,000  tons  of  activated  charcoal  for  use  as  a  gas 
absorbent  in  the  mask  canisters.  The  masks  are  stored  in  her- 
metically sealed  boxes,  a  method  of  preservation  which,  it  is 
hoped,  will  protect  the  rubberized  fabric  from  deterioration  for 
years  to  come.  Other  stored  supplies  include  protective  suits, 
protective  ointment,  and  gas  alarm  devices. 

Such  chemicals  as  the  Chemical  Warfare  Service  did  sell 
after  the  armistice  brought  good  prices.  The  prices  of  many 
chemicals  went  up  after  the  armistice,  and  the  Chemical  War- 
fare Service  profited  accordingly.  The  Service  made  a  profit 
of  100  per  cent  on  the  phosgene  it  sold  and  also  found  a  good 
market  for  its  chlorine. 

Among  the  reserves  stored  at  Edgewood  was  a  considerable 
quantity  of  the  felt  which  was  developed  by  Americans  as  a 
protection  against  arsenical  smoke,  a  deadly  chemical  never 
given  a  trial  in  the  field  of  battle,  but  regarded  as  an  inevitable 
development  in  the  expected  campaign  in  1919.  The  produc- 
tion of  toxic  smoke  was  one  of  the  most  interesting  phases  of 
the  history  of  chemical  warfare  in  the  World  War.  The 
candles  which  projected  this  smoke  were  perhaps  the  most 
appalling  weapon  devised  by  any  of  the  belligerents  during  the 
conflict,  and  the  armistice  interrupted  an  Anglo-American 
project,  well  under  way,  to  asphyxiate  the  Germany  Army 
with  them  in  the  spring  of  1919.  This  development  was  one  of 
the  deepest  military  secrets  both  in  England  and  the  United 
States.  Except  for  the  French,  not  even  the  other  Allies  were 
admitted  to  the  secret. 

The  smoke  candles  employed  an  arsenical  compound  known 
as  diphenolchlorarsine.  In  the  laboratory  this  was  not  a  new 
substance — in  fact,  none  of  the  war  gases  actually  used  in  the 
field  was  a  new  development;  and  of  projected  poisons,  so  far 
as  is  known,  only  the  deadly  Lewisite,  the  invention  of  Captain 
W.  Lee  Lewis  in  the  Chemical  Warfare  Service's  laboratory 
in  Washington,  was  a  new  chemical  creation  evolved  specifi- 


224  DEMOBILIZATION 

cally  for  use  in  war.*  The  other  war  gases  had  all  been  known 
to  organic  chemistry,  some  of  them  for  many  years.  So  with 
diphenolchlorarsine.  It  was  first  produced  in  Germany  in  the 
last  century,  and  the  Germans  also  originated  its  use  as  a 
military  weapon. 

The  Germans  produced  and  used  diphenolchlorarsine  as  a 
solid.  The  substance  was  put  into  glass  bottles,  which,  in  turn, 
were  inserted  in  the  T.  N.  T.  filler  of  shell.  The  explosion  pul- 
verized the  chemical  into  a  fog  which  had  the  advantage  of 
being  able  to  pass  through  the  cotton  baffles  in  the  canister  of 
an  ordinary  gas  mask.  This  fog  was  highly  irritating  to  the 
membrane  of  the  nose  and  throat  and  caused  sneezing,  which 
prevented  a  soldier  gassed  with  it  from  putting  on  his  mask, 
so  that  he  was  left  a  victim  to  more  lethal  gases  fired 
simultaneously. 

The  British  secured  "dud"  shell  containing  diphenol- 
chlorarsine and  at  once  recognized  this  chemical  as  potentially 
much  the  most  fatal  substance  yet  brought  out  in  chemical 
warfare.  But  it  was  evident  that  the  German  was  not  using 
it  properly,  in  such  a  way  as  to  release  its  full  toxic  effect.  The 
question  was  how  to  atomize  diphenolchlorarsine  much  more 
finely.  British  chemists  and  mechanical  engineers  eventually 
succeeded  in  producing  the  substance  in  candles  which  burned 
and  cast  out  dense  smoke.  This  smoke  was  diphenolchlorarsine 
so  finely  divided  that  the  American  gas  mask,  the  most  effective 
mask  of  all,  was  utterly  powerless  against  it.  The  smoke 
particles  passed  freely  through  the  baffles;  and,  since  the  par- 
ticles were  minute  solids  and  not  true  gas  at  all,  they  were 
unaffected  by  the  gas-absorbing  charcoal  and  lime  of  the  mask 
canister. 

Every  masked  experimenter  gassed  by  this  smoke  declared 
that  a  mask  was  worse  than  no  protection  at  all.  It  is  notable, 
too,  that  every  one  gassed,  without  knowing  that  he  was  merely 
reiterating  what  others  before  him  had  said,  declared  that,  if 
he  had  not  been  able  to  escape  quickly  from  the  concentration, 
he  would  have  shot  himself  rather  than  endure  the  agony 

*  Chemical  Warfare.  By  Fries  and  West ;  the  McGraw-Hill  Company. 


TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES  225 

longer.  As  to  the  persistence  and  diffusibility  of  the  smoke,  at 
one  demonstration  when  two  candles  were  burned  in  a  deso- 
late spot  in  England,  civilians  were  slightly  gassed  in  a  village 
several  miles  away. 

So  much  for  the  substance  which  outdid  any  of  the  horrors 
of  the  most  horrible  of  all  wars.  But  the  weapon  was  useless 
unless  protection  against  it  could  also  be  developed.  America 
invented  the  protection — thick  felt  which  was  a  textile  tri- 
umph in  that  it  absolutely  caught  and  held  the  smoke  particles, 
yet  permitted  fairly  easy  breathing  through  itself.  The  plan 
was  to  issue  this  felt  in  small  pieces  which  the  soldiers  could 
wrap  around  their  canisters,  in  order  that  all  inhalation  should 
be  through  the  felt.  The  felt-wrapped  canister  would  then  be 
placed  back  in  its  knapsack.  In  the  joint  project,  we  were  to 
produce  the  protective  felt  and  the  British  the  candles.  The 
British  had  ordered  several  million  of  these  and  were  actually 
producing  them  in  large  quantities  at  the  time  of  the  armistice. 
By  that  date  the  American  mills  were  turning  out  the  felt  by 
thousands  of  yards,  and  our  Chemical  Warfare  Service  was 
also  planning  a  factory  in  which  to  produce  diphenol- 
chlorarsine  candles.  All  this  activity  was  an  intense  secret  in 
both  countries.  The  program  was  being  directed  at  a  certain 
week  in  the  spring  of  1919,  when,  at  a  favorable  hour,  the 
troops  on  our  side  having  quietly  been  protected  against  the 
smoke,  it  was  proposed  to  fire  the  candles  everywhere  along  the 
front.  The  gas  warfare  organizations  of  Great  Britain  and 
America  confidently  expected  that  when  that  lethal  infusion 
had  disappeared,  the  German  Army  would  practically  have 
ceased  to  exist,  and  the  war  would  be  over. 

There  is  reason  to  believe  that  the  German  also  realized  the 
inefficiency  of  diphenolchlorarsine  when  fired  in  shell  and  had 
followed  an  independent  line  of  development  which  led  him 
to  the  production  of  candles.  It  is  asserted  that  such  candles 
were  made  in  Germany  before  the  armistice.  It  is  doubtful, 
however,  whether  the  German  succeeded  in  developing  a  pro- 
tection against  the  smoke. 

After  the  armistice  our  Chemical  Warfare  Service  continued 


226  DEMOBILIZATION 

an  independent  development  of  arsenical  smoke.  The  problem 
was  a  mechanical  one.  The  chemical  is  driven  off  as  smoke  by 
means  of  heat.  If  the  heat  is  too  great,  the  substance  will  bum 
and  be  changed  into  non-toxic  compounds.  If  the  heat  is  too 
mild,  the  smoke  will  not  be  thrown  off  efficiently.  This  problem 
we  have  solved. 

Mention  should  be  made  also  of  that  other  chemical  secret 
of  the  war,  Lewisite.  In  one  sense  Lewisite  can  be  termed  a 
development  of  mustard  gas,  for  the  laboratory  process  of 
making  mustard  suggested  to  Captain  Lewis  certain  analogous 
chemical  reactions,  out  of  one  of  which  came  the  hitherto 
unknown  liquid  which  was  named  after  him.  Like  mustard, 
Lewisite  is  a  so-called  vesicant,  a  substance  which  blisters  the 
skin,  but  it  is  much  more  powerful;  for,  whereas  mustard  gas 
merely  burns.  Lewisite  is  absorbed  through  the  skin  into  the 
system.  Three  drops  of  this  chemical  placed  on  the  belly  of  a 
rat  will  kill  the  animal  in  two  or  three  hours,  and  it  is  believed 
that  this  would  be  the  effect  of  a  similar  quantity  sprinkled  on 
the  skin  of  a  man.  Like  mustard,  too.  Lewisite  gives  off  fumes 
slowly,  and  these  fumes  have  a  burning,  deadly  effect. 

Before  and  since  the  armistice  there  have  been  other  devel- 
opments of  war  gases  in  this  country,  and  for  some  of  these,  as 
well  as  for  some  of  the  better  known  gases,  there  is,  or  can  be, 
civilian  use.  Believing  that  chemical  warfare  has  come  to  stay 
as  long  as  there  shall  be  wars,  the  Chemical  Warfare  Service 
has  sought  since  the  armistice  to  develop  peace-time  uses  for 
war  gases  in  order  that  there  may  be  a  continuous  production  of 
them,  with  a  simultaneous  training  of  chemists  on  whom  the 
Government  can  rely  in  time  of  war.  A  new  tear  gas  which  has 
been  developed  is  called  chloracetophenone.  The  presence  of 
a  minute  quantity  of  this  gas  in  the  air  has  a  blinding  lachry- 
matory effect  upon  the  eyes  of  one  caught  in  it;  yet  the  gas 
is  non-toxic.  Various  metropolitan  police  forces  are  experi- 
menting with  this  gas  to  determine  its  effect  in  dispersing  mobs. 
Another  distressing,  but  not  dangerous,  gas  bears  the  stagger- 
ing chemical  name  of  diphenylaminechlorarsine.  It  is  tem- 
porarily blinding  and  causes  nausea  and  vomiting,  but  it  is  not 


TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES  227 

regarded  as  a  lethal  gas.  It  is  proposed  to  use  this  in  protecting 
vaults  in  which  valuables  are  stored.  Phosgene  is  used  in 
making  brilliant  dyes,  and  it  can  also  be  used  to  exterminate 
rats.  Chlorine  is  a  widely  used  disinfectant.  With  other  war 
gases  it  is  proposed  to  exterminate  numerous  sorts  of  weevil 
and  other  insect  pests  which  annually  cause  great  damage  to 
American  crops.* 

SIGNAL  SUPPLIES 

Signal  corps  contracts  on  the  day  of  the  armistice  were  1,244 
in  number.  They  contemplated  a  production  of  supplies  worth 
upwards  of  $45,000,000.  Telephones,  telegraph  equipment, 
radio,  field  glasses,  photographic  cameras,  pigeons,  wrist 
watches — these  were  the  sorts  of  things  the  Signal  Corps 
procured. 

The  termination  of  this  industry  was  guided  almost  solely 
by  industrial  conditions.  With  most  signaling  supplies  it  was 
impracticable  to  build  up  large  war  reserves.  There  is  perhaps 
no  branch  of  modern  mechanical  development  to  which  applied 
science  pays  more  attention  than  it  does  to  perfecting  the 
means  of  communication.  Progress  is  rapid,  and  therefore  any 
large  reserves  of  supplies  set  aside  by  the  Signal  Corps  were 
likely  to  become  obsolete  and  without  value  after  a  few  years. 
Moreover,  although  the  war  industry  of  the  Signal  Corps 
scored  its  greatest  production  records  with  such  common  things 
as  telephone  and  telegraph  instruments  and  wire,  all  this  equip- 
ment was  of  special  design  unknown  in  ordinary  commercial 
use  and  therefore  without  value  to  it.  Consequently  there  was 
not  the  usual  good  business  reason  to  continue  production 
under  the  well-advanced  signal  corps  contracts — namely,  that 
a  greater  cash  recovery  could  be  obtained  from  the  sale  of 
finished  products  than  from  the  junk  sale  of  semi-finished 
materials.  Finally,  many  of  the  signal  corps  supplies — and  this 
applies  particularly  to  radio — were  heavily  protected  by  valid 
patents.  These  patents  the  Government  made  free  with  during 

*  Abridged  from  the  discussion  in  Chemical   Warfare.  By  Fries  and  West ; 
the  McGraw-Hill  Company. 


228  DEMOBILIZATION 

the  war,  but  the  existence  of  the  patents  virtually  precluded 
the  Government  from  selling  its  excess  radio  equipment  after 
the  war.  For  these  and  other  reasons  the  signal  corps  war  busi- 
ness was  terminated  at  precisely  the  rate  at  which  the  manu- 
facturing equipment  and  its  operatives  could  be  diverted  to 
other  work. 

Unlike  the  Ordnance  Department  and  the  Air  Service,  the 
Signal  Corps  was  not  organized  before  the  armistice  by  manu- 
facturing districts,  but  conducted  all  its  business  from  the 
central  office  in  Washington.  The  Washington  headquarters, 
however,  maintained  intimate  contact  with  the  contractors 
through  its  so-called  flying  squadron,  an  organization  of  officers 
who  visited  the  war  factories,  inspected  their  work,  and  co- 
operated with  the  producers  in  the  solution  of  their  shop 
•problems.  This  same  organization  after  the  armistice  con- 
ducted the  field  work  of  the  industrial  liquidation,  acting 
under  the  direction  of  the  Signal  Corps  Board  of  Contract 
Termination,  which,  in  turn,  was  subsidiary  to  the  War  De- 
partment Claims  Board. 

The  new  and  unused  materials  acquired  before  the  industry 
could  be  terminated  were  disposed  of  in  various  ways.  Ade- 
quate war  reserves  of  supplies  were  placed  in  safe  storage. 
During  the  war  the  Signal  Corps  had  built  up  a  large  training 
school  at  Camp  Alfred  Vail  in  New  Jersey.  This  camp  has 
been  retained  as  a  permanent  adjunct  to  the  Signal  Corps.  To 
the  warehouses  of  Camp  Vail  were  sent  large  quantities  of 
surplus  signal  corps  supplies,  both  finished  articles  and  par- 
tially manufactured  apparatus,  there  to  be  studied  and  de- 
veloped in  the  laboratories  of  the  camp.  The  Post  Office 
Department  took  a  certain  amount  of  radio  telephone  and  tele- 
graph apparatus  for  use  on  its  mail  planes.  The  Forest  Service 
took  radio  and  also  some  of  the  homing  pigeons  for  use  in  its 
fire-protection  service  in  the  national  forests.  Other  supplies 
were  sold  to  the  public. 

The  Signal  Corps,  as  one  of  its  duties,  created  and  compiled 
a  photographic  history  of  America's  participation  in  the  World 
War,  both  in  motion  pictures  and  in  "still"  views.  The  hun- 


TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES  229 

dreds  of  thousands  of  negatives  in  this  history  were  collected 
in  Washington  after  the  armistice  and  stored  in  a  specially 
constructed  building  which  is  not  only  fireproof,  but  which 
provides  air  of  uniform  temperature  and  dryness,  to  prevent 
rapid  deterioration  of  the  negatives.  A  complete  catalogue  of 
views  was  prepared,  and  the  sale  of  duplicates  to  the  public 
was  authorized.  Many  of  the  illustrations  in  these  volumes  are 
taken  from  that  collection. 

The  disposal  of  surplus  A.  E.  F.  signaling  equipment  was 
notable  in  that  it  included  a  large  sale  to  the  French  Govern- 
ment of  equipment  not  embraced  by  the  general  bulk  sale  of 
1919.  When  the  armistice  came  the  A.  E.  F.  was  provided  with 
hundreds  of  miles  of  main-line  telephone  and  telegraph  cables, 
hooking  up  a  complete  net  of  branch  lines,  wires,  and  ex- 
changes, all  of  it  American-made  and  American-operated.  The 
question  was  whether  to  rip  it  all  out,  after  which  it  would  be 
represented  by  some  thousands  of  tons  of  junk,  or  to  sell  it 
intact  as  it  was;  and  there  was  but  one  possible  customer,  the 
French  Government,  which  monopolizes  telegraph  and  tele- 
phone communication  in  France.  Signal  corps  officers  in  France 
took  up  with  the  French  Government,  directly  after  the  armi- 
stice, the  question  of  the  sale  of  these  installations  to  France, 
and  the  negotiations  were  so  well  advanced  in  the  spring  of 
1919,  when  the  United  States  Liquidation  Commission  (which 
conducted  the  blanket  sale)  arrived,  that  the  signal  corps  sale 
was  specifically  exempted  from  the  bulk  sale.  France  paid 
$6,400,000  for  the  installations.  France  and  England  jointly 
paid  $130,000  for  the  American  cross-Channel  cable,  laid  with 
great  difficulty  (and  at  an  approximate  cost  of  $238,000) 
between  Cackmere,  England,  and  Cap  d'Antifer,  France.* 
Negotiations  were  also  under  way  for  the  purchase  by  the 
French  Government  of  a  large  quantity  of  American  wire- 
system  construction  material,  but  this  was  finally  included  in 
the  supplies  delivered  under  the  terms  of  the  bulk  sale.  Sales 
to  other  governments  and  to  individuals  were  small. 

*  Under  the  contract  France  and  England  must  at  any  time  lease  this  or 
some  other  cross-Channel  cable  to  the  United  States  upon  the  request  of  this 
country. 


230  DEMOBILIZATION 

MOTOR  VEHICLES 

All  of  the  A.  E.  F.'s  surplus  motor  vehicles  (a  classification 
including  bicycles  and  trailers  as  well  as  trucks,  automobiles, 
motorcycles,  and  sidecars),  as  this  surplus  existed  in  August, 
1919,  went  to  the  French  Government  under  the  terms  of  the 
bulk  sale.  The  sale  value  of  these  vehicles  was  estimated  by 
our  appraisers  at  $100,000,000,  an  estimate  arrived  at  as  fol- 
lows: the  original  purchase  cost  had  been  $310,000,000. 
Wear  and  tear,  however,  had  reduced  the  usable  value  to  the 
Army  to  $220,000,000.  A  second-hand  machine,  however,  must 
be  sold  at  a  second-hand  price,  which  will  not  represent  the 
value  of  the  machine  to  the  owner  disposing  of  it.  A  fair 
second-hand  sale  value  of  this  equipment  (assuming  that  the 
vehicles  would  be  sold  to  private  purchasers)  was  estimated  at 
$132,000,000.  But  sale  in  bulk  to  the  French  Government 
relieved  the  United  States  of  the  cost  of  disposing  of  the 
vehicles  in  various  sized  lots  to  private  purchasers.  It  was  esti- 
mated that  the  overhead  expense  of  selling  the  vehicles  to  indi- 
viduals would  be  approximately  $32,000,000.  As  one  item  in 
this  sales  expense,  it  would  require  the  services  of  3,000  troops 
for  one  year  to  take  care  of  the  unsold  vehicles.  In  that  interval 
there  would  be  a  further  depreciation  in  the  value  of  the 
vehicles.  Therefore,  the  A.  E.  F.  was  willing  to  throw  off 
$32,000,000  and  make  to  the  French  Government  a  flat  price 
of  $100,000,000  for  the  equipment. 

Before  this  sale,  however,  there  had  been  sales  to  others, 
both  governments  and  speculators.  The  Poles  and  some  of  the 
new  Slavic  nations  bought  nearly  3,000  vehicles  from  the 
A.  E.  F.  American  motor  vehicles  in  England  (they  were  not 
many)  were  sold  at  auction.  The  Italian  Government  bought 
about  200  trucks,  ambulances,  and  motorcycles.  As  our  troops 
were  demobilized  from  the  Army  of  Occupation  in  Germany, 
they  left  a  surplus  of  over  14,000  motor  vehicles.  These  were 
sold  to  a  British  syndicate  for  $25,000,000.  Over  1,200  trucks 
of  German  make,  acquired  by  the  A.  E.  F.  under  the  armistice 
terms,  were  sold  to  a  German  dealer. 

The  war  orders  for  motor  vehicles  (including  bicycles  and 


Photo  from  Engineer  Departjnent 


AIR  VIEW  OF  A.  E.  F.  ORDNANCE  DOCKS 


Photo  by  Air  Service 


A  GAS  DEMONSTRATION 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

MOTOR  TRANSPORT  IN  FRANCE 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

PART  OF  A.  E.  F.'S  SURPLUS  MOTOR  EQUIPMENT 


TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES  231 

trailers)  of  all  sorts  from  American  factories  called  for  the 
production  of  434,000  of  them.  Of  this  number  approximately 
110,000  were  bicycles  and  trailers,  the  rest  being  motor 
vehicles  proper.  The  war  industry  had  produced  great  num- 
bers of  these  vehicles  before  the  armistice,  1 18,000  having  been 
shipped  to  the  A.  E.  F.,  while  thousands  of  others  were  either 
in  use  by  the  Army  within  the  United  States  or  were  awaiting 
shipment  overseas  on  the  day  of  the  armistice.  By  the  fourth 
day  of  the  armistice,  termination  requests  had  stopped  the  pro- 
duction of  178,000  vehicles  under  the  war  orders.  The  rest 
were  allowed  to  go  through  to  completion.  Adding  to  the  re- 
serves on  hand  at  the  signing  of  the  armistice  the  production 
after  the  armistice,  we  find  that  the  results  of  the  war  industry 
were  to  provide  the  Army  in  this  country  with  138,000  motor 
vehicles,  none  of  which  had  crossed  the  ocean. 

The  continuation  of  production  after  the  armistice  was 
allowed  for  numerous  reasons.  A  motor  truck  is  an  article 
readily  salable  at  a  good  price.  Its  fabricated  parts,  however, 
have  little  value  other  than  that  of  scrap  metal.  Moreover,  to 
permit  the  completion  of  contracts  saved  the  Government  from 
the  payment  of  cancellation  charges.  For  example,  as  a  result 
of  these  business  considerations  one  order  for  8,000  Standard 
B  trucks,  under  which  order  production  had  started  about 
November  1,  1918,  was  allowed  to  go  through  to  completion. 
The  Standard  B  truck  was  an  assemblage  of  standard  parts. 
Many  factories  made  the  parts,  and  a  few,  under  contract  with 
the  Government,  assembled  the  parts  and  turned  out  the  com- 
pleted chassis.  To  have  terminated  the  contracts  would  have 
left  on  the  Government's  hands  a  mass  of  parts  of  doubtful 
sales  value  and  an  obligation  to  pay  heavy  cancellation  charges 
besides.  The  completed  trucks  could  be  sold  for  nearly  all,  if 
not  all,  the  money  the  Government  had  put  into  them.  The 
same  was  true  of  some  of  the  other  standardized  trucks. 

Production  was  continued  in  some  instances  to  place  in  the 
Army's  hands  certain  sorts  of  trucks  of  which  the  Army  was 
short  even  after  the  great  production  ending  with  the  armistice. 
Finally,  many  of  the  truck  factories  were  working  exclusively 


232  DEMOBILIZATION 

on  government  contracts,  and  to  have  ended  this  work  forth- 
with would  have  thrown  tens  of  thousands  of  men  out  of  work. 
It  is  notable,  however,  that  two  of  the  largest  contractors,  the 
Ford  Motor  Company  and  the  Dodge  Motor  Company,  both 
of  Detroit,  agreed  to  accept  termination  of  all  work  uncom- 
pleted on  November  16,  1918,  at  no  cost  to  the  Government 
except  the  cost  of  uncompleted  materials  which  they  would  be 
unable  to  use  in  their  commercial  enterprises. 

The  whole  vast  war  business  of  building  motor  vehicles  for 
the  Army  was  terminated  at  a  cost  of  $12,300,000  to  the 
Government.  As  an  offset  to  this  cost,  the  Government  took  in 
materials  worth  $4,100,000,  making  the  net  cost  of  termina- 
tion about  $8,200,000. 

MEDICAL  SUPPLIES 

The  armistice  turned  what  had  been  an  insufficient  quantity 
of  medical  supplies  for  the  expanding,  fighting  American  Army 
into  an  enormous  surplus  for  the  demobilizing  Army  and  the 
future  permanent  military  establishment.  The  total  purchases 
by  the  Medical  Corps  had  reached  a  value  of  nearly  $250,000,- 
000.  Of  these  purchases,  supplies  to  the  value  of  about  $11,- 
000,000  had  been  procured  in  Europe,  principally  in  France. 
The  supplies  on  hand  on  the  day  of  the  armistice  and  delivered 
on  contract  afterwards  were  worth  $110,000,000. 

With  the  warehouses  filled  with  hospital  equipment,  medi- 
cines, ambulances,  and  the  other  articles  which  the  military 
surgeons  used,  the  war  industry  producing  these  things  was 
terminated  expeditiously  after  the  armistice.  In  the  United 
States  over  1,400  contracts  and  purchase  orders,  calling  for  the 
production  of  supplies  worth  $60,000,000,  were  terminated  at 
a  net  cancellation  cost  of  $3,000,000.  Deliveries  after  the 
armistice  from  American  factories  gave  to  the  Medical  Corps 
supplies  worth  $32,000,000.  In  France  and  England  the  con- 
tract cancellations  saved  $3,500,000.  These  cancellations 
terminated,  among  other  things,  a  project  which  would  in 
time  have  delivered  to  the  A.  E.  F.  twenty-nine  complete 
ambulance  trains,  each  with  sixteen  coaches.  Nineteen  such 
trains  had  been  delivered  to  the  A.  E.  F.  before  the  armistice. 


TECHNICAL  SUPPLIES  233 

In  the  general  bulk  sale  of  A.  E.  F.  property  to  the  French 
Government  went  American  medical  supplies  worth  $34,000,- 
000.  The  Medical  Corps  turned  over  to  the  American  Red 
Cross  in  France  supplies  worth  $9,000,000  for  use  in  the  relief 
of  the  stricken  populations  of  Europe.  To  other  governments 
the  A.  E.  F.  sold  medical  supplies  worth  $6,000,000.  The  rest 
of  the  medical  supplies  in  Europe  were  returned  to  the  United 
States.  In  this  country  the  surplus  medical  supplies  were  dis- 
tributed in  various  ways — to  the  Public  Health  Service,  into 
the  army  reserves,  and  (by  sale)  to  the  public. 


CHAPTER  XV 
QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES 

THE  quartermaster  does  not  loom  large  against  the 
heroic  background  of  war.  The  Army's  victualer  and 
clothier  collects  few  croix  de  guerre^  and  his  interest  in 
the  Congressional  Medal  of  Honor  is  impersonal.  So  long  as 
his  work  is  going  well,  you  hear  little  about  him ;  'but  let  him 
once  supply  some  tainted  beef  to  the  troops  in  the  field  or  fail 
to  deliver  on  time  the  Army's  winter  underwear,  and  then  the 
country  takes  notice  of  the  quartermaster. 

God  nowadays  is  on  the  side  of  the  army  with  the  best  busi- 
ness organization,  as  even  Napoleon  himself  might  admit  if 
he  were  to  look  over  the  cash  balances  of  the  late  war.  By  that 
token  the  Quartermaster  Service  was  the  chief  factor  in  the 
victory,  because  that  organization  became  approximately  the 
business  office  of  the  Army.  For  purely  the  creature  comforts — 
food,  clothing,  and  shelter — the  Army  spent  far  more  money 
than  it  did  for  its  weapons  and  ammunition ;  but  the  activities 
of  the  army  quartermasters  embraced  a  much  wider  range  of 
supplies  than  these.  Theorize  as  you  will  about  the  evolution 
of  the  Army's  purchasing  offices  during  the  war  until  they 
were  brought  together  into  a  single  centralized  purchasing 
agency,  the  fact  remains  that  the  ultimate  purchasing  agency 
was  essentially  the  Quartermaster  Service,  magnified  and  ex- 
panded in  power.  General  George  W.  Goethals  was  Quarter- 
master General  when  the  General  Staff  Division  of  Purchase, 
Storage,  and  Traffic  (which  unified  all  army  buying  and 
brought  order  into  the  supply  situation)  was  built  around 
his  personality  and  ability,  and  thereafter  his  chief  assistant 
bore  the  title  of  "Quartermaster  General,  Director  of  Purchase 
and  Storage."  The  new  Division  retained  all  the  duties  of 
buying  quartermaster  supplies  and  assumed  also  the  duty  of 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  235 

buying  all  other  supplies  except  the  strictly  technical  ones. 
And  even  these  were  purchased  by  the  older  supply  bureaus 
under  the  complete  supervision  of  the  Division  of  Purchase, 
Storage,  and  Traffic. 

When  we  approach  the  subject  of  the  demobilization  of  the 
war  industry  which  produced  quartermaster  supplies,  we  con- 
front what  was,  measured  in  tons  and  in  dollars  and  cents,  the 
greatest  business  undertaking  of  the  war.  These  pages  have 
been  filled  by  the  story  of  the  spectacular  contest  of  American 
industrial  genius  with  the  inanimate  resources  which  it  fabri- 
cated into  airplanes,  artillery,  and  ammunition ;  but  what  filled 
the  freight  trains  and  the  holds  of  the  transatlantic  cargo 
transports  and  the  fleets  of  roaring  trucks  on  the  roads  of 
France  was  not  arms  and  the  machinery  of  destruction  to  the 
degree  that  it  was  eatables  and  wearables,  tentage,  stoves  and 
ranges,  pots  and  pans — quartermaster  supplies.  There  was  the 
main  weight  and  bulk;  into  them  went  the  most  money. 

The  war  business  of  the  Director  of  Purchase  was  repre- 
sented by  nearly  16,000  contracts.  The  total  face  value  of 
these  contracts  came  to  nearly  $8,000,000,000.  They  repre- 
sented all  food  procured  by  the  Army  during  the  war  and 
afterwards,  all  forage  for  the  Army's  animals,  all  clothing,  all 
textile  supplies  of  every  sort,  all  shoes,  harness,  and  other 
leather  goods,  all  animals  purchased,  all  motor  vehicles,  all 
wagons  of  every  sort,  all  carts  hand-drawn,  engineering  supplies 
of  many  kinds,  all  coal,  oil,  gasoline,  paints,  hospital  equip- 
ment, medical  and  surgical  supplies,  hardware  of  all  sorts, 
tools,  tentage  and  other  camp  equipment,  rope,  office  supplies, 
and  many  less  conspicuous  things.  Several  of  these  classes,  it 
will  be  noted,  consisted  of  munitions  formerly  procured  by  the 
separate  technical  supply  bureaus,  but  the  mass  of  them  were 
the  traditional  quartermaster  supplies. 

To  get  a  comprehensive  and  clear-cut  picture  of  the  de- 
mobilization of  this  branch  of  war  industry,  let  us  start  in 
France  and  follow  back  the  home-bound  expedition  after  it 
had  closed  up  its  business  abroad. 

In  the  first  place,  the  A.  E.  F.  became  a  heavy  purchaser  of 


236  DEMOBILIZATION 

quartermaster  supplies  abroad.  The  purchasing  office  of  the 
expedition  became  a  great  business  organization.  It  bought 
supplies  in  almost  every  accessible  country  of  Europe,  and  its 
agents  even  went  to  Africa  and  made  purchases  in  Algeria  and 
Morocco.  These  supplies  were  bought,  not  because  America 
could  not  furnish  them,  but  for  the  familiar  sake  of  saving  the 
use  of  the  precious  ocean  tonnage.  And  a  great  deal  of  tonnage 
was  saved  by  these  foreign  purchases.  The  Quartermaster 
Corps  with  the  A.  E.  F.  purchased  400,000  tons  of  miscel- 
laneous supplies,  but  chiefly  food  and  clothing,  at  the  cost  of 
$150,000,000.  In  addition,  many  horses  were  procured  in 
Europe.  The  greatest  tonnage  saving  of  all,  however,  was 
brought  about  by  the  arrangement  which  permitted  the 
A.  E.  F.  to  purchase  coal  at  the  Welsh  mines.  The  cross-Chan- 
nel fleet  freighted  more  than  1,000,000  tons  of  coal  from 
England.  This  not  only  relieved  the  transatlantic  fleet  of  the 
necessity  of  lifting  that  amount  of  cargo,  but  it  also  permitted 
the  employment  in  the  Channel  of  vessels  not  well  adapted  to 
the  transoceanic  convoying.  It  is  a  moderate  estimate  that  the 
American  quartermaster  purchases  abroad  saved  the  trans- 
atlantic shipment  of  1,500,000  tons  of  cargo,  a  lading  that 
would  fill  300  large  ships. 

Naturally  the  armistice  found  France,  principally,  and  the 
other  nations  of  western  Europe  to  a  slighter  extent,  liberally 
sprinkled  with  A.  E.  F.  contracts  for  the  production  of  quar- 
termaster supplies.  Sixty-six  French  factories,  for  instance, 
were  working  exclusively  for  the  Americans  in  producing 
bread,  biscuits,  macaroni,  and  candy.  The  question  imme- 
diately arose  as  to  the  best  method  of  stopping  all  European 
production  for  the  A.  E.  F.  The  expedition's  warehouses  and 
depots  were  crammed  to  their  capacities,  and  additional  sup- 
plies were  on  the  ocean  in  transports  bound  for  France.  A 
month,  even  a  week,  earlier  it  had  not  seemed  possible  that 
the  industries  of  America  and  Europe  put  together,  could 
produce  an  oversupply  of  these  munitions,  for  the  A.  E.  F. 
was  looking  forward  to  a  strength  of  4,500,000  men  in  1919. 
But  with  the  sudden  armistice  the  expedition  found  itself  with 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  237 

a  stock  of  supplies  on  hand  which   it  could   not   possibly 
consume. 

For  that  reason  its  European  war  industry  was  terminated 
abruptly.  There  was  little  of  the  tapering-off  of  production 
that  was  characteristic  of  the  demobilization  in  the  United 
States.  The  military  authorities  were  not  nearly  so  considerate 
of  the  welfare  of  their  foreign  contractors  as  they  were  of  those 
at  home.  The  American  business  abroad  was  so  small,  com- 
pared with  the  whole  war  industry  of  the  countries  of  the 
Allies,  that  the  outright  abrogation  of  the  American  contracts 
could  not  cause  a  general  industrial  slump.  But  there  were 
other  considerations.  The  War  Department  could  make  use  of 
much  of  the  domestic  post-armistice  production,  either  as  war 
reserves  or  as  goods  for  sale.  In  Europe  every  pound  of  quar- 
termaster supplies  produced  after  the  armistice  was  likely  to 
prove  a  dead  loss  to  the  United  States.  Such  supplies  were  not 
needed  for  military  reserves,  of  which  there  was  an  abundance 
already  within  the  United  States.  They  could  not  be  sold 
advantageously  abroad,  because  there  was  no  market  for  them, 
with  the  Allied  armies  dumping  their  enormous  surpluses  on 
that  same  market.  They  could  not  be  shipped  in  reasonable 
time  to  the  United  States  for  sale,  because  of  the  lack  of  ocean 
tonnage.  Consequently,  whereas  it  was  the  policy  within  the 
United  States  to  terminate  war  industry  gradually,  the  key- 
note of  our  industrial  demobilization  abroad  was  outright  can- 
cellation. It  was  cheaper  to  pay  cancellation  indemnities  than 
to  accept  the  supplies  that  would  otherwise  have  been  pro- 
duced; and  this  was  the  general  policy  adopted  in  terminating 
all  our  foreign  contracts,  with  such  exceptions,  notably  in  some 
of  the  airplane  and  artillery  contracts,  as  are  noted  elsewhere 
in  this  volume. 

To  investigate  claims  and  negotiate  settlements  with  the 
European  contractors  the  A.  E.  F.  created  its  Board  of  Con- 
tracts and  Adjustments,  which  for  several  months  served  as  the 
liquidating  agency  for  the  war  business.  Later  the  unsettled 
cases  were  turned  over  for  final  disposal  by  the  United  States 
Liquidation  Commission. 


238  DEMOBILIZATION 

The  termination  of  the  foreign  production  for  the  A.  E.  F. 
was  not  nearly  so  puzzling  a  problem  as  the  disposition  of 
the  excess  military  stores  with  the  expedition.  We  had  shipped 
from  the  United  States  to  the  A.  E.  F.  over  6,000,000  tons  of 
military  supplies,  and  those  shipments  now  crowded  the  ware- 
houses in  the  American  areas.  After  the  armistice  the  first  step 
looking  to  the  disposition  of  these  stocks  was  a  rough,  but 
fairly  comprehensive,  inventory  of  all  military  property  stored 
in  our  bases  and  depots.  This  inventory  gave  basis  for  an  esti- 
mate of  a  surplus  valued  at  $1,500,000,000  over  and  above 
what  the  diminishing  forces  abroad  could  possibly  use.  Nearly 
half  these  excess  stores  were  quartermaster  supplies,  therefore 
goods  more  or  less  perishable.  Long  before  the  American  cargo 
ships  could  transport  these  supplies  back  to  America  they  would 
have  lost  value  to  the  amount  of  untold  millions  of  dollars. 
The  Government  faced  an  enormous  loss.  Whatever  was  to  be 
done  about  it  had  to  be  done  quickly.  The  one  way  out  was  to 
sell  the  surplus  in  Europe,  but  it  was  a  grave  question  whether 
that  could  be  done  successfully  at  all. 

In  the  first  place,  all  our  army  supplies  had  been  placed  in 
France  without  the  payment  of  any  import  duties.  So  long  as 
these  supplies  were  being  consumed  by  the  American  soldiers, 
well  and  good;  but,  when  it  was  proposed  to  sell  them  to 
private  purchasers  outside  the  A.  E.  F.,  the  French  Govern- 
ment insisted  upon  its  right  to  collect  import  taxes  upon  such 
supplies  as  were  to  be  sold.  When  the  United  States  was  not 
ready  to  concede  this  point,  then  the  French  Government 
offered  the  alternative  of  permitting  the  United  States  to  sell 
its  surplus  in  France  without  payment  of  import  duties,  pro- 
vided the  sales  were  made  exclusively  to  the  French  Govern- 
ment itself.  The  United  States  felt  obliged  to  accept  this 
condition. 

Thus,  in  selling  our  surplus  in  France  we  were  limited  to  a 
single  customer;  and  when  you  can  sell  your  product  to  only 
one  buyer  you  must  prepare  to  accept  the  buyer's  scale  of 
prices.  Of  course,  the  inhibition  upon  sales  did  not  apply  to 
sales  to  other  foreign  governments;   for   in   that  event  the 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  239 

American  goods  were  regarded  as  being  in  France  in  bond,  and 
it  was  not  incumbent  upon  the  United  States  to  pay  the  French 
import  duties  upon  them.  On  the  other  hand,  a  physical  reason 
operated  against  the  sale  of  stores  to  European  countries  out- 
side France — the  run-down  and  almost  wrecked  condition  of 
the  French  railroads.  The  delivery  of  locomotives  and  cars  by 
the  Germans  under  the  armistice  terms  virtually  rehabilitated 
the  rolling  stock  of  the  French  railways,  but  the  trackage  had 
deteriorated  during  the  war,  and  the  incursions  of  military 
conscription  had  left  the  operating  personnel  poor  in  quality 
and  deficient  in  quantity.  It  was  next  to  impossible  to  ship 
anything  out  of  France.  During  the  early  months  after  the 
armistice  America  sold  surplus  supplies  to  various  countries  of 
Europe  outside  France — particularly  to  Belgium  and  the 
liberated  nations  of  southeastern  Europe — to  the  value  of 
many  millions;  but,  up  to  August  i,  1919,  it  had  been  able  to 
deliver  less  than  one-fifth  of  these  supplies. 

Another  advantage  accruing  to  France  as  the  principal  buyer 
of  the  American  surplus  was  that  the  A.  E.  F.  was  making 
what  amounted  to  a  forced  sale.  If  anything  was  evident  in  the 
attitude  of  the  French  people  after  the  armistice,  it  was  that 
they  earnestly  desired  to  speed  their  departing  military  guests 
out  of  France.  The  American  troops  no  less  ardently  wished  to 
go,  and  it  was  the  policy  of  the  American  Government  to  re- 
patriate them  as  rapidly  as  the  shipping  could  be  provided. 
The  disposal  of  the  supplies  was  a  secondary  consideration. 
If  the  Americans  had  attempted  to  hold  out  for  favorable 
markets  and  good  prices  for  their  surpluses  in  piecemeal  sales, 
they  would  have  had  to  keep  from  20,000  to  30,000  troops  in 
France  for  several  years  to  guard  the  unsold  stocks.  The  alter- 
native of  hiring  civilian  guards  was  out  of  the  question,  from 
the  standpoint  of  expense  alone.  There  was  nothing  else  to  do 
except  sell  out  quickly  for  the  best  prices  obtainable  under  the 
circumstances. 

These  obvious  advantages  to  the  French  in  striking  a  bar- 
gain price  for  the  bulk  of  the  American  surplus  property  in 
France  was  largely  counterbalanced  by  the  fact  that,  of  the 


240  DEMOBILIZATION 

American  quartermaster  stores  for  sale,  nearly  half  consisted 
of  food  supplies,  and  the  highest-quality  food  then  in  Europe. 
There  was  no  oversupply  of  food  in  Europe,  but  the  very  con- 
trary. England  had  surplus  army  property  estimated  to  be 
worth  more  than  $3,000,000,000;  France  herself  had  almost 
as  much  to  dispose  of;  and  Italy  was  to  be  a  heavy  seller;  but 
the  food  stocks  in  all  these  Allied  surpluses  were  not  enough 
to  satisfy  the  hunger  of  the  undernourished  or  actually  famine- 
stricken  populations  of  Europe.  The  much-desired  food  was 
used  by  the  American  authorities  to  induce  the  French  not  only 
to  pay  good  prices  for  materials  they  did  not  need,  and  of 
which  indeed  they  had  surpluses  of  their  own,  but  also  to 
accept  responsibility  for  such  liabilities  as  the  American  stores 
of  unstable  and  dangerous  ammunition  and  our  accumulations 
of  junk. 

Such  were  some  of  the  conditions  surrounding  the  bulk  sale 
of  A.  E.  F.  surplus  property  to  the  French  Government  in  the 
summer  of  1919.  This  sale,  as  we  have  said,  was  consummated 
by  the  United  States  Liquidation  Commission,  the  activities 
of  which  are  to  be  discussed  in  greater  detail  farther  on.  Mean- 
while a  sporadic  and  piecemeal  sale  of  A.  E.  F.  property  in 
Europe  had  been  going  on  under  the  direction  of  the  General 
Sales  Agent  and  General  Sales  Board  of  the  A.  E.  F.  The 
General  Sales  Agent  took  up  his  work  on  January  1,  1919.  He 
was  assisted  by  the  General  Sales  Board,  which  was  made  up 
of  representatives  of  all  the  army  organizations  that  had  any- 
thing to  sell.  Under  this  organization  the  sales  of  surplus 
materials  reached  a  total  of  approximately  $175,000,000  by 
the  end  of  July,  1919,  just  before  the  general  bulk  sale  was 
closed.  Of  these  receipts  the  sales  of  quartermaster  supplies 
accounted  for  $122,000,000.  The  supplies  were  sold  almost 
exclusively  to  governments  and  relief  and  welfare  commis- 
sions. The  sales  to  commercial  firms  and  individuals  were 
insignificant. 

Almost  as  soon  as  the  armistice  was  signed  the  needy  nations 
of  Europe  opened  negotiations  for  the  purchase  of  excess 
quartermaster  supplies  of  the  A.   E.   F.,  particularly  food. 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  241 

Semi-starvation  was  chronic  in  most  of  the  newly  liberated 
countries  of  southeastern  Europe.  The  Poles  were  still  fighting 
and  needed  supplies  for  their  soldiers.  Belgium  and  northern 
France  were  impoverished  by  the  German  occupation.  Austria 
was  in  the  grip  of  actual  famine,  and  the  hungry  mobs  were 
rioting  in  Vienna.  In  fact,  some  of  the  first  surplus  A.  E.  F. 
food  to  be  sold  was  shipped  into  Austria.  It  was  a  situation 
which  demanded  scientific  study,  since,  no  matter  how  much 
the  American  officials  individually  might  sympathize  with  the 
European  civilians,  their  first  duty  was  to  safeguard  the  inter- 
ests of  the  taxpayers  of  the  United  States;  and  that  meant  to 
discover  what  ones  of  the  needy  were  willing  and  able  to  pay 
the  best  prices.  Consequently  the  General  Sales  Board  of  the 
A.  E.  F.  created  its  information  bureau,  which  investigated 
the  conditions  throughout  Europe  and  reported  to  the  Board. 
These  investigations  enabled  the  A.  E.  F.  to  distribute  its 
surpluses  intelligently. 

Before  the  general  sales  organization  took  hold,  the  Quarter- 
master Corps  itself  in  France  had  been  disposing  of  surplus 
stores  during  the  first  weeks  of  the  armistice.  Many  of  these 
early  sales  were  made  to  Mr.  Herbert  Hoover  for  the  Belgian 
Relief  Commission.  When,  in  January,  1919,  Congress  appro- 
priated $100,000,000  for  the  relief  of  starving  Europe,  Mr. 
Hoover,  who  had  the  spending  of  the  money,  was  urged  to 
make  use  of  the  excess  A.  E.  F.  supplies  as  much  as  possible. 
The  largest  single  sale  of  A.  E.  F.  surplus  food  was  made  to 
the  Belgian  Relief  Commission.  About  $30,000,000  changed 
hands  in  the  transaction,  and  the  food  sold  included  such  items 
as  60,000,000  pounds  of  army  issue  bacon,  122,000,000 
pounds  of  flour,  6,000,000  pounds  of  rice,  and  600,000,000 
cans  of  evaporated  milk.  All  this  time,  too,  the  General  Sales 
Board  was  selling  directly  to  the  Belgian  Government;  and  the 
Relief  Commission  cooperated  with  the  Army  to  make  sure 
that  Belgium,  through  these  two  channels  of  supply,  did  not 
receive  an  undue  portion  of  the  army  stores.  There  was  always 
danger  that  Belgian  speculators  might  acquire  stocks  of  such 
surplus  products  as  fats  and  soap  and  sell  them  into  Germany 


242  DEMOBILIZATION 

at  famine  prices.  Twice  this  cooperation  was  able  to  checkmate 
the  plans  of  cold-blooded  profiteers.  Next  to  making  advan- 
tageous sales,  the  chief  concern  of  the  General  Sales  Board  was 
to  distribute  its  products  fairly  among  the  countries  in  direst 
need. 

The  Government  of  Portugal  bought  a  large  number  of 
American  army  shoes.  Czecho-Slovakia  took  10,000  army  over- 
coats, much  other  clothing,  and  several  hundred  tons  of  food 
supplies.  The  Polish  Relief  Corporation  bought  quartermaster 
supplies  to  the  value  of  $1,500,000.  Roumania  took  a  con- 
signment of  food  and  clothing  at  $7,150,000.  Portugal  took  a 
shipload  of  potatoes  f.  o.  b.  Ireland.  These  nations,  Serbia, 
Esthonia,  and  several  others,  were  constantly  in  the  market  for 
American  supplies.  Esthonia  bought  3,000  tons  of  army  bacon. 
The  French  Government,  too,  was  a  large  purchaser  during 
this  piecemeal  selling,  on  one  occasion  buying  American  sus- 
penders to  the  value  of  $22,000,  as  well  as  large  quantities 
of  food  and  clothing. 

For  the  most  part  the  United  States  accepted  debentures 
rather  than  cash  in  payment  for  these  supplies.  It  was  ob- 
viously impossible  to  secure  cash,  for  the  small  nations  did  not 
have  any,  and  even  France  was  skipping  the  interest  payments 
on  her  five-billion-dollar  debt  to  the  United  States.  The  Ameri- 
can Government  accepted  treasury  notes  or  other  official  securi- 
ties at  par,  payable  in  three  to  five  years  with  interest  at  5  per 
cent.  And,  although  such  credits  would  have  been  heavily 
discounted  in  commercial  centers,  nevertheless  America  did  not 
try  to  cover  by  charging  high  prices  for  the  surplus  stores  or 
by  exacting  profits  of  any  sort.  The  greater  part  of  our  supplies 
were  sold  at  the  cost  of  manufacture  in  the  United  States  plus 
the  cost  of  transportation  to  Europe,  and  plus  nothing  else. 
Consequently  the  sales  proved  to  be  a  great  stroke  of  adver- 
tising for  the  fair  name  of  the  United  States. 

Trainload  after  trainload  of  supplies  sold  in  this  fashion 
left  the  American  depots  during  the  spring  and  early  summer 
of  1919;  but  still,  when  the  bulk  sale  to  France  went  through, 
these  shipments  had  seemed  to  make  scarcely  any  impression 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  243 

upon  the  mass  of  the  surplus,  so  great  had  been  the  reserves 
created  in  France  by  American  industry.  The  utilization  value 
of  the  surplus  army  property  in  France  was  estimated  at 
$1,000,000,000.  Of  this  quantity,  quartermaster  stocks  (not 
including  animals)  were  valued  at  $670,000,000.  Of  this  sur- 
plus an  amount  worth  $87,000,000  (consisting  principally  of 
new  clothing)  was  returned  to  the  United  States,  and  the  rest, 
except  what  had  been  disposed  of  by  individual  sale,  was 
turned  over  to  the  French  Government,  the  final  delivery 
being  made  on  November  15,  1919. 

None  of  these  sales  included  the  used  supplies  repaired  and 
restored  in  the  army  salvage  shops  in  France.  Salvage  was  a 
new  note  amid  the  age-old  wastefulness  of  war.  After  the  great 
battles  of  the  Civil  War  the  countryside  was  littered  with  the 
debris  of  warfare.  The  bodies  of  men  and  animals  were  buried, 
and  the  soldiers  did  what  they  could  to  clean  up  by  burning  the 
refuse  they  could  collect;  but  for  the  most  part  the  disposi- 
tion of  muskets,  sabers,  cannon,  harness,  and  clothing  was  left 
to  the  souvenir  hunter  and  to  the  slow  action  of  the  elements. 
After  our  battles  in  the  World  War  far  more  materials  were 
left  abandoned  on  the  field  than  after  any  conflict  of  the  Civil 
War,  but  these  materials  were  picked  up  and  reclaimed  for 
such  value  as  the  Army  could  still  get  out  of  them.  And  the 
Army  found  that  it  could  make  valuable  use  of  salvaged  ma- 
terials, and  particularly  of  salvaged  clothing.  The  savings 
wrought  by  salvage  ran  close  to  $150,000,000  in  cash  value, 
besides  representing  a  great  economy  in  the  use  of  shipping  space 
in  the  ocean  transports. 

Whereas,  before  the  armistice,  many  of  the  recovered  sup- 
plies went  into  the  army  stores  for  reissue,  in  1919,  when  the 
A.  E.  F.  was  rapidly  dwindling  in  size,  the  salvaged  articles 
were  sold,  and  principally  to  the  French.  All  through  France 
one  could  see  peasants  of  both  sexes  wearing  articles  once  of 
American  army  issue.  Paris  might  dictate  women's  styles  to 
America;  but  Paris,  Kentucky,  where  dwelt  some  of  the  seam- 
stresses doing  home  work  for  the  great  army  shirt  factory  at 
Jeffersonville,   Indiana,   had   something   to  say   about   what 


244  DEMOBILIZATION 

French  women  wore.  The  French  peasant  woman  wearing  an 
American  army  shirt,  with  a  bit  of  ribbon  for  a  collar,  was  a 
common  enough  sight  in  some  of  the  former  American  areas. 
Another  familiar  makeshift  was  the  skirt  made  of  an  ex-army 
blanket.  Even  the  dumps,  on  which  were  thrown  materials  of 
which  the  salvage  shops  could  make  no  use,  were  carefully 
sorted  over  by  the  peasants,  who  sometimes  trudged  for  miles 
with  their  carts  in  order  to  avail  themselves  of  these  oppor- 
tunities. 

Extensive  commercial  sales  of  salvaged  materials  were  also 
made.  Crushed  tin  cans  sold  by  the  ton  as  metal  scrap.  Rags 
went  to  the  French  paper  makers  and  waste  wool  to  the  English 
textile  mills.  Grease,  damaged  oats,  damaged  flour,  and  worn 
rubber  tires  also  went  by  sale.  The  Polish  Army  bought  re- 
claimed American  harness  by  weight.  A  large  number  of  outer 
uniforms,  having  shrunk  in  sterilization  so  as  to  be  too  small 
for  reissue,  were  dyed  black  and  sold  to  the  Belgian  Relief 
Commission  for  wear  by  destitute  civilians.  Germans  paid 
record  prices  for  grease  and  other  kitchen  waste  products.  The 
salvage  sales  in  1919  brought  in  more  than  $4,000,000. 

The  horses  and  mules  used  by  the  A.  E.  F.  were  not  included 
in  the  bulk  sale  of  property  to  the  French  Government.  The 
disposition  of  them  (for  few,  if  any,  A.  E.  F.  animals  were 
returned  to  the  United  States)  was  a  separate  transaction,  con- 
ducted almost  entirely  by  the  Remount  Service  of  the  A.  E.  F., 
a  branch  of  the  Quartermaster  Corps.  The  A.  E.  F.  acquired 
in  all  some  243,000  animals  at  a  cost  of  $82,500,000.  More 
than  two-thirds  of  them  were  purchased  abroad  by  the  Ameri- 
cans. The  mules  numbered  61,000,  and  of  these  approximately 
half  came  from  the  United  States,  the  rest  principally  from 
southern  France  and  Spain.  About  64,000  animals  died  in  the 
service,  and  the  rest  were  sold  in  Europe  either  to  various 
governments  or  to  civilians,  the  recovery  from  these  sales 
being  slightly  more  than  $33,000,000.  Thus  the  net  war  cost 
of  the  animals  used  by  our  forces  in  Europe  was  approximately 
$50,000,000. 

With  Americans  the  horse  is  (or  is  supposed  to  be)  a  single- 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  245 

purpose  animal,  used  exclusively  for  his  power  of  motivity, 
whether  that  power  be  exerted  for  speed  or  for  pulling  a  load. 
To  many  Europeans  he  also  possesses  gastronomic  value,  and 
this  fact  enabled  the  Remount  Service  to  get  good  prices  for 
condemned  horses  from  the  expeditionary  corrals.  About 
11,000  horses,  broken  down  by  service,  were  sold  by  the 
A.  E.  F.  to  French  and  German  butchers,  at  an  average  price 
of  $50  a  head. 

Because  of  the  dearth  of  farm  animals  in  France,  the  French 
Government  offered  no  objection  to  the  sale  of  the  surplus 
horses  and  mules  directly  to  private  buyers.  The  chief  condi- 
tion made  was  that  the  animals  must  first  be  offered  (at  auc- 
tion) to  farmers  whose  horses  had  been  requisitioned  during 
the  war.  If  these  men  would  not  offer  satisfactory  prices, 
then  anyone  was  to  be  allowed  to  bid.  Then  the  French  Gov- 
ernment arranged  to  take  over  15,000  A.  E.  F.  animals  and 
dispose  of  them  for  the  expedition.  The  prices  obtained  from 
the  French  Government  under  this  arrangement  were  so  much 
below  what  the  A.  E.  F.  was  obtaining  from  its  auctions  that 
the  United  States  Liquidation  Commission  sought  and  received 
authority  to  dispose  of  all  the  animals  at  auction.  Because  of 
the  high  taxes  and  auctioneers'  commissions,  even  the  auction 
sale  was  not  satisfactory ;  and  the  Remount  Service  asked  per- 
mission to  sell  animals  at  private  sale.  This  permission  was 
never  formally  granted,  but  nevertheless  the  Remount  Service 
went  ahead  and  sold  thousands  of  animals  directly  to  buyers. 
The  average  price  received  from  the  French  Government  was 
$77.58  a  head,  whereas  from  the  auction  and  direct  sales  to 
private  purchasers  the  average  price  received  was  $201.65. 

The  French  Government  itself,  by  direct  purchases  from  the 
A.  E.  F.,  took  50,000  animals  at  an  average  price  of  $190.21 
a  head.  Thousands  of  surplus  animals  at  good  prices  went  to 
the  governments  of  Belgium,  Poland,  Czecho-Slovakia,  and 
Bavaria.  To  civilians  in  France  and  Germany  went  85,000 
A.  E.  F.  animals.  Approximately  the  last  of  the  original  243,- 
000  had  been  sold  when  the  final  troops  of  the  A.  E.  F.  departed 
for  the  United  States  in  the  late  summer  of  1919. 


246  DEMOBILIZATION 

Although  we  sent  to  France  some  of  the  finest  mules  in 
America  (and,  therefore,  in  the  world),  there  was  at  first  some 
difficulty  in  disposing  of  them  to  the  French  buyers.  The 
farmers  of  southern  France  knew  the  mule  and  justly  valued 
it,  and  during  the  early  months  of  the  demobilization  a  con- 
stant stream  of  American  army  mules  went  into  that  region 
for  sale.  Finally  the  southern  French  mule  market  became 
glutted,  and  then  it  became  necessary  to  "sell"  the  mule  to  the 
farmers  in  the  American  areas  in  northern  France.  The  French 
peasants  did  not  hold  the  mule's  clouded  ancestry  against  him, 
but  ^hat  their  thriftiness  did  object  to  was  his  dearth  of  hope 
of  posterity.  However,  after  a  few  of  the  peasants  had  bought 
and  worked  the  army  mules,  the  good  qualities  of  the  animal 
became  widely  advertised,  and  thousands  of  them  thereafter 
were  bought  at  good  prices. 

After  the  armistice  the  first  step  in  the  liquidation  of  the 
quartermaster  war  business  and  of  the  other  enterprises  con- 
ducted by  the  Director  of  Purchase  in  the  United  States  was 
to  terminate  the  industry  and  to  settle  with  the  contractors,  of 
whom,  as  is  indicated  above,  there  were  approximately  15,900 
— parties  to  agreements  which  committed  the  United  States  to 
purchase  supplies  to  the  value  of  more  than  $7,800,000,000.  A 
large  part  of  these  were  quartermaster  supplies,  but  they  also 
included  motor  vehicles  and  engineering,  medical,  signal  corps, 
and  general  supplies,  the  procurement  of  which,  under  the  re- 
organization of  the  War  Department,  was  placed  in  the  hands 
of  the  Director  of  Purchase. 

The  immediate  result  of  the  armistice  was  to  silence  the 
activity  in  these  thousands  of  factories.  The  Director  of  Pur- 
chase sent  broadcast  by  telegraph  a  general  request  to  suspend 
all  production  while  the  War  Department  could  estimate  its 
position.  After  a  few  days  the  mills  were  permitted  to  resume 
production.  Subsequently  about  5,000  of  the  contracts  were 
allowed  to  go  through  to  completion.  The  remaining  11,000 
were  terminated  either  abruptly,  as  with  those  under  which 
no  production  had  started,  or  by  graduation,  when  that  was 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

A.  E.  F.  SUPPLY  TRAIN  ON  WAY  TO  RATION  DUMP 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

A.  E.  F.  FLOUR  ON  WAY  TO  STARVING  AUSTRIA 


Photo  by  Signiil  iCr/' 


A.  E.  F.  HORSES  TO  BE  SOLD 


Photo  from  Quartermaster  Department 

STORAGE  WAREHOUSES  AT  JEFFERSONVILLE  DEPOT 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  247 

advantageous  either  to  the  Government  or  to  the  industrial 
situation. 

Like  the  Ordnance  Department  and  the  Air  Service,  the 
Quartermaster  Corps  decentralized  the  supervision  of  its  war 
industry  into  manufacturing  districts — thirteen  of  them — 
which  were  called  zones.  When  most  of  the  purchasing  activi- 
ties of  the  War  Department  were  brought  together  under  the 
Director  of  Purchase,  these  zones  came  along  with  the  trans- 
ferred organization,  as  did  also  seven  procurement  divisions 
taken  over  from  the  other  supply  bureaus.  During  the  de- 
mobilization, claims  boards  were  established  in  all  the  zones 
and  procurement  divisions.  These  twenty  primary  boards  were 
subsidiary  to  the  general  Purchase  Claims  Board,  which  in  turn 
was  responsible  to  the  War  Department  Claims  Board  through 
the  representative  of  the  latter  attached  to  the  Purchase  Claims 
Board.  This  was  the  organization  which  settled  the  vast  war 
business  conducted  under  the  Director  of  Purchase. 

The  general  policies,  the  application  of  which  to  the  ter- 
mination of  the  ordnance  contracts  we  have  already  described, 
were  followed  in  closing  out  the  industry  which  manufactured 
our  quartermaster  supplies.  The  Government  paid  no  prospec- 
tive profits,  but  stood  all  the  legitimate  expenses  which  the 
manufacturer  had  incurred  looking  to  future  production  of 
finished  supplies. 

But  it  was  not  all  termination  and  no  buying  for  the  Director 
of  Purchase  after  the  armistice.  There  was  still  an  enormous 
army  in  the  field  and  camps  which  had  to  be  sustained;  and, 
while  great  surpluses  existed  in  some  branches  of  supply,  in 
others,  such  as  immediately  perishable  supplies,  the  stocks  on 
hand  were  sufficient  for  only  a  few  weeks  ahead.  The  purchases 
between  the  date  of  the  armistice  and  January  24,  1920,  by 
which  date  the  demobilization  of  troops  was  about  complete, 
came  to  $61 1,000,000,  of  which  food  purchases  accounted  for 
$420,000,000. 

One  national  inheritance  from  the  war  experience  in  buying 
quartermaster  supplies  has  been  the  creation  at  Chicago  of  a 
permanent  subsistence  school  to  which  the  Army  sends  officers 


248  DEMOBILIZATION 

and  enlisted  men  for  training  as  inspectors  and  buyers  of  food 
supplies.  Another  is  the  creation  within  the  War  Department 
of  a  division  which  studies  the  sources  and  supplies  of  the  raw 
materials  used  by  war  industry  and  also  determines  the  priority 
of  access  to  these  materials  by  the  various  consuming  branches 
of  the  War  Department.  When  the  war  came,  the  United 
States  was  sadly  lacking  in  the  very  knowledge  which  these 
studies  will  develop.  During  the  war  the  development  of  raw 
materials  and  the  determination  of  priorities  were  adminis- 
tered by  the  Council  of  National  Defense  and,  later  and  more 
successfully,  by  the  War  Industries  Board,  which  became  per- 
haps the  most  powerful  and  important  of  all  the  emergency 
war  organizations.  The  War  Department  is  thus  retaining  a 
nucleus  around  which  another  such  organization  might  be 
built  in  a  future  emergency. 

No  outline  of  the  demobilization  of  the  quartermaster  war 
enterprises  portrays  an  adequate  picture  of  what  happened 
unless  it  tells  something  about  the  tennination  of  the  Govern- 
ment's wool  business.  To  protect  its  war  interests  the  Govern- 
ment requisitioned  all  the  raw  wool  in  the  United  States  in 
1917  and  1918.  Uncle  Sam  himself  became  the  wool  trade,  the 
sole  dealer,  the  sole  market.  Although  the  Navy  and  several 
other  government  branches  used  wool,  the  control  over  the 
commodity  was  exercised  by  the  War  Department  through  its 
Wool  Administrator  at  Boston,  who  reported  to  the  Quarter- 
master General  in  Washington. 

On  the  first  day  of  the  armistice  the  Government  had  on  its 
hands,  or  was  obligated  to  accept  delivery  of,  about  525,000,- 
000  pounds  of  wool,  a  quantity  which  may  be  visualized  by 
comparing  it  with  the  total  annual  American  production  of 
wool,  which  is  less  than  300,000,000  pounds.  About  one-fifth 
of  this  quantity  was  Australasian  wool  which  had  been  pur- 
chased by  the  Foreign  Mission  of  the  War  Industries  Board. 
About  100,000  bales  (33,000,000  pounds)  of  the  Australasian 
wool  had  been  shipped  to  the  United  States.  We  were  left, 
therefore,  with  a  binding  contract  to  accept  200,000  bales  from 
the  Antipodes,  this  to  come  piling  in  on  top  of  an  accumula- 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  249 

tion  which  comprised  a  huge  surplus  over  and  above  the  normal 
national  consumption.  By  some  clever  business  jockeying  (the 
British  having  various  American  contracts  which  they  also 
wished  to  terminate)  the  British  Government  was  induced  to 
cancel  the  unfulfilled  portion  of  the  wool  contract. 

Even  with  this  deduction,  the  Wool  Administrator  had,  in 
the  late  autumn  of  1918,  about  460,000,000  pounds  of  wool 
to  dispose  of.  The  normal  textile  industry  had  never  before 
been  called  upon  to  absorb  such  a  visible  supply,  and  there  was 
some  question  if  it  would  be  able  to  do  so.  The  manufacturers 
naturally  began  at  once  to  urge  the  Government  to  dump  its 
wool  on  the  market.  The  700,000  American  wool  growers,  on 
the  other  hand,  who  had  been  receiving  a  high  and  stable  price 
for  wool  (the  price  adopted  on  July  30,  1917)  urged  the 
Government  to  stay  in  the  business  for  another  year  at  least 
and  take  the  1919  clip  at  the  war  price. 

The  decision  in  Washington  was  to  sell  the  wool  and  get  out 
of  the  wool  business  at  once.  This  was  displeasing  to  the 
farmers ;  but,  to  prevent  any  drastic  slump  in  wool  prices,  the 
War  Department  decided  to  sell  its  wool  in  auction  sales,  in 
which  the  Government  itself  would  set  minimum  prices  below 
which  no  wool  would  be  sold.  This  action  guaranteed  that  the 
growers  would  get  a  fair  price  for  the  1919  clip. 

Within  approximately  a  month  after  the  armistice  the  wool 
auctions  began — first  at  Boston,  where  in  three  days  (Decem- 
ber 18,  19,  and  20,  1918)  the  buyers  bid  in  over  10,000,000 
pounds  of  wool,  out  of  17,000,000  pounds  offered  for  sale. 
The  unsold  offerings,  of  course,  were  lots  for  which  no  buyers 
bid  up  to  the  minimum  fixed  prices.  Although  prices  were  fixed, 
only  in  a  sense  were  they  sustained  artificially.  For  each  sort 
of  wool  the  Government  fixed  a  minimum  price  which  equaled 
what  it  would  cost  to  import  the  same  quantity  and  grade  of 
wool  and  deliver  it  to  the  American  market.  Thus  the  world 
prices  actually  prevailed,  except  that  the  huge  American  sur- 
plus was  artificially  kept  from  being  a  depressing  factor  in  the 
world  price.  To  sustain  prices  higher  than  these  would  have 
attracted  large  importations  and  thus  injured  the  growers.  To 


250  DEMOBILIZATION 

allow  prices  to  go  lower  than  the  importation  prices  would  also 
have  worked  injury  to  the  wool  growers  of  the  United  States. 

As  a  further  concession  to  the  farmers,  the  Government  an- 
nounced that  it  would  stay  out  of  the  wool  market  when  the 
1919  American  clip  began  reaching  the  market  in  quantities 
sufficient  to  supply  the  mills.  In  accordance  with  this  promise, 
the  government  wool  sales  ceased  on  July  1,  1919,  and  did  not 
resume  again  until  the  following  November. 

When  the  auctions  suspended  on  July  1,  more  that  316,- 
000,000  pounds  of  the  Government's  wool  had  been  sold. 
Auctions  had  been  held  twice  a  month  in  Boston  and  once  a 
month  in  Philadelphia,  and  three  sales  had  been  conducted  at 
Portland,  Oregon,  for  the  benefit  of  the  western  woolen  mills. 
Upon  the  resumption  of  the  sales  in  November  the  wool  con- 
tinued to  sell  well,  with  the  result  that  by  the  end  of  1919  the 
sales  had  disposed  of  365,000,000  pounds,  and  the  success  of 
the  complete  liquidation  was  assured.  The  sale  of  this  wool  was 
a  triumph  of  merchandizing.  The  wool  trade  had  never  known 
such  sales  before,  not  even  in  England,  the  world  center  of 
wool,  nor  had  the  American  trade  ever  before  absorbed  such  a 
quantity  of  wool  in  such  a  short  time. 

Like  the  storied  mill  which  ground  salt  until  it  swamped 
the  ship  of  the  thieving  merchant,  the  mill  producing  quarter- 
master supplies  before  the  armistice  was  hard  to  stop  after- 
wards, and  its  output  embarrassed  the  War  Department  for 
want  of  space  in  which  to  store  the  excess  supplies.  As  long  as 
the  home  Army  and  the  A.  E.  F.  were  expanding  in  size  and 
the  convoys  grew  in  size  and  frequency,  there  was  no  critical 
backing-up  of  supplies.  Immediately  after  the  armistice,  how- 
ever, the  order  came  to  ship  no  more  freight  to  France,  except 
food  and  other  necessaries  specifically  requested.  At  the  time  of 
the  armistice  there  were  600,000  tons  of  supplies  on  the  docks 
in  this  country  and  400,000  other  tons  moving  toward  the  sea- 
board. Since  the  mills  kept  right  on  producing  more,  the  flood 
of  new  materials  inundated  the  supply  service  in  this  country. 
In  December,  1918,  the  Storage  Service  was  operating  65,000,- 
000  square  feet  of  warehouse  space  in  the  United  States.  A 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  251 

year  later  it  was  occupying  nearly  400,000,000  square  feet, 
three-fourths  of  which  was  leased.  A  large  quantity  of  this 
space  was  open  storage,  unprotected  from  the  elements.  These 
figures  are  exclusive  of  the  quantities  of  warehousing  and  open 
storage  occupied  by  the  various  technical  bureaus,  such  as  the 
Ordnance  Department,  the  Air  Service,  and  the  Signal  Corps. 
The  operation  of  the  general  storage  facilities  was  the  charge 
of  the  Director  of  Storage,  one  of  the  chief  functionaries  of 
the  Division  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic. 

An  even  greater  problem  than  storage  was  the  disposition  of 
the  enormous  surpluses  of  goods  which  accumulated  after  the 
armistice.  The  first  concern  of  the  War  Department  in  ap- 
proaching this  question  was  the  military  future  of  the  United 
States.  In  1914  much  was  made  of  the  thoroughness  of  German 
military  preparation,  which  had  been  such  that,  when  the  fatal 
hour  struck  and  the  conscripts  by  hundreds  of  thousands  left 
their  homes  and  poured  into  the  German  barracks,  for  every 
man  there  was  waiting  ready  a  uniform,  shoes,  a  helmet, 
underclothing,  and  everything  needed  to  prepare  him  imme- 
diately for  service  in  the  field.  What  Germany  had  been  able 
to  accomplish  by  premeditated,  long,  and  expensive  effort,  the 
United  States  now  derives  as  a  by-product  of  the  war  Germany 
forced  it  to  fight,  America,  too,  is  now  prepared  in  these  minute 
details.  Before  any  of  the  surplus  quartermaster  stocks  were 
set  aside  for  sale  or  other  disposition,  a  complete  and  balanced 
selection  of  uniforms,  overcoats,  underclothing,  socks,  caps, 
shoes,  and  other  nonperishable  articles  in  the  individual  equip- 
ment of  troops,  in  quantities  sufficient  to  outfit  an  army  of 
approximately  1,000,000  men,  was  set  aside  and  placed  in 
indefinite  storage.  In  addition,  stores  of  such  supplies  were 
retained  for  the  future  consumption  of  the  regular  standing 
Army,  of  the  National  Guard,  and  of  the  Reserve  Officers' 
Training  Corps. 

The  war  construction  provided  for  the  War  Department 
three  enormous  interior  reserve  depots  located  respectively  at 
Schenectady,  New  York,  New  Cumberland,  Pennsylvania,  and 
Columbus,  Ohio.  In  these  many  of  the  reserve  quartermaster 


252  DEMOBILIZATION 

supplies  are  stored.  These  installations  are  all  of  permanent 
and  spacious  construction.  The  warehouses  are  nearly  all  one 
story  high,  built  of  hollow  tile  and  concrete,  and  divided  into 
sections  by  fire  walls.  For  additional  storage  the  War  Depart- 
ment is  also  using  numerous  wooden  warehouses  built  at  the  re- 
tained cantonments.  These  buildings,  though  well  constructed, 
are  not  fireproof  and  have  to  be  guarded  carefully  to  prevent 
their  destruction. 

It  was  found  further  that  various  branches  of  the  Govern- 
ment could  make  good  use  of  supplies  originally  procured  for 
the  Army.  Many  of  the  army  hospitals  were  turned  over  to  the 
Public  Health  Service,  and  with  the  hospitals  the  War  Depart- 
ment delivered  large  quantities  of  medical  supplies.  Inci- 
dentally it  may  be  noted  here  that  the  Army  has  retained  and 
stored  sufficient  field  medical  equipment  for  an  army  of  1,000,- 
000  men.  Large  lots  of  such  general  supplies  as  hardware, 
tools,  rope,  brushes,  and  office  furniture  went  to  the  Bureau  of 
Public  Roads,  the  Interior  Department,  the  Panama  Canal, 
and  other  federal  agencies. 

Then,  several  foreign  governments  were  allowed  to  pur- 
chase from  our  excess  supplies.  Clothing,  textiles,  medical  equip- 
ment, and  other  supplies,  all  to  the  value  of  $20,000,000,  went 
to  various  Russian  societies.  The  French  Government  took 
machine  tools  and  other  machinery  originally  built  for  the 
Engineers,  to  the  value  of  $25,000,000.  Belgium  bought  a 
large  quantity  of  construction  materials. 

In  selling  surplus  materials  to  consumers  in  the  United 
States,  the  preference  went  to  charitable  and  welfare  organiza- 
tions. Hospital  equipment,  for  instance,  was  offered  first  to 
state  and  municipal  hospitals,  free  clinics,  and  similar  institu- 
tions. Prices  for  medical  supplies  were  fixed  far  below  the 
prevailing  market  prices;  and  yet  the  Government  had  manu- 
factured this  equipment  at  such  low  cost  that  the  financial  re- 
covery from  the  sales  represented  practically  every  penny 
which  the  War  Department  had  put  into  the  supplies.  General 
supplies  were  offered  first  to  welfare  organizations,  the  Young 


I 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  253 

Men's  Christian  Association,  the  Boy  Scouts,  hospitals,  sani- 
tariums, and  relief  societies. 

After  that  came  the  public.  Private  dealers  were  permitted 
to  bid  on  lots  of  supplies.  Regular  days  were  set  apart  for  the 
sale  of  various  classes  of  commodities:  Monday,  textiles  and 
leather  goods;  Tuesday,  raw  materials,  machinery,  and  engi- 
neering supplies;  Wednesday,  general  supplies;  Thursday, 
medical  supplies  and  motor  vehicles;  Friday,  clothing;  and 
Saturday,  food  supplies.  These  bidding  sales  were  widely  ad- 
vertised, in  advance,  and  bids  could  be  submitted  either  to  the 
War  Department  in  Washington  or  to  any  of  the  zone,  or  dis- 
trict, supply  offices.  The  private  consumer  could  buy  army 
food,  clothing,  textiles,  tools,  and  other  commodities  of  house- 
hold utility  either  by  parcel  post  (through  the  cooperation  of 
the  Post  Office  Department)  or  at  any  of  the  Army's  retail 
stores,  a  great  chain  of  which  was  set  up  throughout  the 
country. 

By  sales  and  transfers  the  Army,  at  the  end  of  the  first  year 
of  effort,  had  disposed  of  supplies  originally  procured  under 
the  administration  of  the  Director  of  Purchase  to  the  value  of 
$357,000,000.  The  transfers  and  sales  brought  back  to  the 
War  Department  more  than  seventy-seven  cents  of  every 
dollar  originally  expended  in  the  production  of  these  goods. 
The  story  of  the  ingenuity  displayed  by  the  Government's 
officers  in  selling  these  and  other  surplus  supplies  (particu- 
larly the  surpluses  in  the  hands  of  the  Ordnance  Department 
and  the  Air  Service  after  the  armistice)  is  left  for  another 
chapter. 

Before  dropping  the  subject  of  the  demobilization  of  the 
quartermaster  war  business,  however,  we  should  not  overlook 
the  disposition  of  the  horses  and  mules  acquired  by  the  Army, 
but  not  shipped  to  France.  The  Remount  Service  purchased 
about  308,000  animals  during  the  war.  It  started  the  war  with 
about  90,000  animals  on  hand.  The  war  losses  amounted  to 
33,000  animals.  Approximately  68,000  were  shipped  to 
France.  Thus,  at  the  time  of  the  armistice  the  Remount  Service 
had  in  its  stables  and  corrals  nearly  300,000  horses  and  mules. 


254  DEMOBILIZATION 

About  215,000  of  these  were  declared  surplus  and  sold,  and  the 
rest  were  retained  for  the  permanent  Army. 

The  decision  of  the  Remount  Service  to  sell  200,000  animals 
on  the  market  as  rapidly  as  the  market  could  absorb  them  was 
roundly  criticized  by  horsemen,  who  pointed  out  that  normally 
the  American  market  had  never  absorbed  more  than  60,000 
horses  and  mules  in  a  year.  The  result  would  be,  the  critics  de- 
clared, that  the  Government  would  get  fair  prices  for  the 
first  50,000  or  60,000  animals  offered,  and  after  that  the 
surplus  animals  would  be  a  drug  on  the  market,  not  only  forc- 
ing the  Government  to  stand  a  great  financial  loss,  but  so  de- 
pressing prices  that  dealers  everywhere  would  suffer.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  was  costing  the  Government  a  dollar  a  day  to 
feed  and  care  for  each  of  these  animals.  By  retarding  the  sales 
the  Government  might  be  able  to  get  better  prices,  but  the  gain 
would  be  more  than  absorbed  by  the  cost  of  maintaining  the 
establishment  in  the  meantime. 

And  so  it  worked  out.  The  market,  indeed,  proved  itself  to 
be  able  to  absorb  the  surplus  animals,  and  prices  even  grew 
better  as  the  sales  progressed.  The  average  price  paid  was  $111 
a  head,  or  about  57  per  cent  of  the  original  average  cost  of 
$192.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Government  escaped  paying 
heavy  maintenance  charges. 

All  the  animals  were  sold  at  public  auctions,  189  of  which 
were  held  at  thirty-nine  different  places.  Great  crowds  of 
buyers  attended  the  sales,  most  of  which  were  held  at  camps 
where  the  animals  were  quartered.  The  local  post  exchanges 
sold  sandwiches  and  other  refreshments  to  the  buyers.  Although 
the  Government  guaranteed  no  animals,  all  of  them  were  care- 
fully examined  for  blemishes  and  defects  before  the  sales,  and 
their  demerits  were  noted  in  the  lists  read  by  the  auctioneers. 
The  Government  could  not  afford  to  gain  a  David  Harum  repu- 
tation as  a  horse  trader,  for  it  had  too  many  animals  to  sell.  If 
dissatisfaction  arose  from  the  earlier  sales,  it  would  adversely 
affect  the  later  ones.  Only  five  complaints  from  buyers  were 
made  after  the  sales.  These  were  referred  to  the  Purchase 
Claims  Board  for  settlement. 


QUARTERMASTER  SUPPLIES  255 

The  Government  invested  $74,000,000  in  animals  bought 
in  America  during  the  war.  Its  net  loss  on  animals  sold  v^^as 
$22,000,000,  and  on  animals  that  died,  $6,000,000.  The  best 
of  the  animals  on  hand  after  the  armistice  were  retained  for 
use  by  the  permanent  Army. 


CHAPTER  XVI 
BUILDINGS  AND  LANDS 

ONE  of  the  major  industrial  activities  conducted  in  the 
United  States  during  the  war  was  the  construction  of 
buildings  for  the  Army.  The  Army's  physical  plant, 
as  it  existed  on  the  day  war  was  declared,  was  entirely  inade- 
quate for  the  forces  to  be  mobilized — so  inadequate  as  to  be 
of  almost  no  use  at  all.  Even  the  old  headquarters  of  the  War 
Department  in  Washington,  which  formerly  had  housed  prac- 
tically all  the  administrative  offices,  were  none  too  large  to 
accommodate  merely  the  office  staffs  of  the  Secretary  of  War 
and  his  principal  assistants,  so  great  was  the  expansion  of  the 
central  administration;  and  as  for  the  tens  of  thousands  of 
officers,  clerks,  stenographers,  messengers,  and  other  personnel 
employed  by  the  great  producing  and  operating  bureaus,  they 
occupied  literally  miles  of  flimsy,  unsightly  "war  buildings," 
which  spread  out  like  a  defacing  rash  over  the  fair  open  spaces 
of  the  capital  city. 

An  even  greater  expansion  of  plant  was  to  be  observed 
throughout  the  country.  The  plant  set  up  for  the  Army  mo- 
bilized against  Germany  was  a  practically  new  creation, 
specialized  for  exactly  the  sort  of  war  in  which  we  were  en- 
gaged. It  was  a  war  in  which  land  transportation  had  to  be 
linked  to  ocean  transportation,  and  therefore  the  plant 
included  vast  facilities  for  the  embarkation  of  troops  and  a 
string  of  mighty  export  terminals,  or  bases,  strung  out  along 
the  coast  in  order  to  make  difficult  any  blockade  of  our  over- 
seas supply  line.  It  was  a  war  essentially  industrial  in  type, 
with  unusual  emphasis  laid  upon  the  development  of  special 
industrial  products,  such  as  powder  and  explosives ;  and  there- 
fore the  plant  included  dozens  of  new  mills  and  factories, 
several  of  them  industrial  centers  so  large  as  to  be  virtually 


BUILDINGS  AND  LANDS  257 

small  cities  in  themselves,  with  housing  and  modern  municipal 
conveniences  for  their  employees.  It  was  a  war  in  which  new 
and  hitherto  unknown  forms  of  combat  had  sprung  into 
existence,  and  therefore  the  plant  included  equipped  fields  for 
the  training  of  soldiers  in  such  arts  as  flying  and  the  employ- 
ment of  poisons  as  weapons.  Above  all,  it  was  a  war  which 
called  upon  the  ultimate  resources  of  American  man  power; 
and,  as  it  turned  out,  the  plant  had  to  be  adequate  to  house, 
school,  amuse,  care  for,  and  maintain  at  least  two  million 
men,  with  all  that  that  implies  in  barracks,  drill  grounds,  parks 
for  vehicles,  water  and  sewer  systems,  lighting  systems,  roads, 
hospitals,  and  (in  the  maintenance  line)  depots  and  warehouses 
for  supplies. 

It  was  all  fresh  creation,  new  construction.  The  building 
industry  of  the  United  States — and  it  is  one  of  the  largest  and 
strongest  of  our  industries — had  never  before  been  called  upon 
to  provide  such  expansion  in  an  equal  time.  It  follows  that  the 
entire  building  industry  must  have  been  engaged  in  the  con- 
struction enterprise,  that  every  available  man  who  could  drive 
a  nail  or  lay  a  brick  must  have  been  employed  upon  govern- 
ment work.  If  he  was  not,  he  should  have  been;  for  those  in 
charge  of  the  construction,  unable  to  secure  sufficient  labor 
from  the  entire  building  industry  of  the  United  States,  sent 
ships  to  Porto  Rico  and  the  Bahamas  and  brought  back  thou- 
sands of  workmen  to  help  out.  The  Construction  Division,  the 
war-begotten  organization  which  was  in  charge  of  this  activity, 
with  427,000  men  on  its  contractors'  pay  rolls  at  the  peak  of 
its  industriousness,  yielded  only  to  the  United  States  Railroad 
Administration  the  title  of  greatest  employer  of  war  labor.  It 
engaged  in  581  separate  construction  projects,  which  called  for 
an  expenditure  of  over  $1,100,000,000;  and  it  completed 
most  of  them. 

Miles  of  docks,  hundreds  of  acres  of  covered  storage,  hun- 
dreds of  power  plants  and  complete  water  systems,  thousands 
of  miles  of  roads,  railroads,  water  mains,  and  sewer  lines — the 
list  grows  monotonous  simply  because  of  the  size  of  its  items, 
which  are  not  to  be  visualized  by  stating  them  in  terms  of  acres 


258  DEMOBILIZATION 

and  miles.  The  activity  was  at  its  height  at  the  signing  of  the 
armistice,  when  it  became  incumbent  upon  the  Construction 
Division  to  terminate  the  work. 

Four  hundred  and  fifty  army  construction  projects  were 
under  way  on  the  day  of  the  armistice.  One  hundred  and  thirty- 
one  stood  completed.  The  incomplete  projects  included  some  of 
the  largest  and  costliest  ones.  But  the  salvage  value  of  build- 
ings is  small  unless  they  can  be  sold  to  purchasers  able  to  make 
use  of  them  as  and  where  they  stand.  Few  war  buildings  were 
adapted  to  civilian  use.  They  were  highly  specialized  for  a 
purely  war  use,  and  they  were  not  often  located  where  they 
could  be  of  economic  benefit  to  the  country.  A  large  part  of 
their  cost  represented  the  evanescent  element  of  labor,  a  value 
entirely  destroyed  when  buildings  are  wrecked  for  the  sake  of 
salvaging  their  materials.  The  war  plant,  even  incomplete, 
represented  an  immense  investment,  but  one  which  would  be 
almost  altogether  lost  if  the  plant  were  to  be  knocked  down 
for  salvage.  Therefore  it  was  of  advantage  to  the  Government 
to  carry  on  a  surprisingly  large  amount  of  war  construction 
after  the  armistice  for  the  sake  of  getting  the  use-value  from 
its  investment  by  occupying  these  installations  with  the  per- 
manent Army. 

But  there  were  other  reasons  for  continuing  work.  Among 
the  largest  and  costliest  of  the  construction  projects  were  those 
which  provided  the  ocean  terminal  bases  at  Boston,  Brooklyn, 
Philadelphia,  Norfolk,  Charleston,  and  New  Orleans.  These 
installations  were  all  of  durable,  fireproof  construction;  and, 
with  their  piers,  their  great  warehouses  equipped  with  labor- 
saving  machinery,  trackage,  and  the  like,  they  were  the  last 
word  of  modem  constructional  science  in  developments  of  this 
sort.  In  appropriating  the  money  for  these  port  works.  Con- 
gress had  stipulated  that  after  the  war  they  should  be  used  in 
the  development  of  American  foreign  trade.  Consequently  the 
Construction  Division  went  ahead  after  the  armistice  and  fin- 
ished up  these  buildings. 

The  port  works  alone  were  enough  to  account  for  a  large 
portion  of  the  money  expended  on  construction  after  the  armi- 


BUILDINGS  AND  LANDS  259 

stice,  but  in  addition  other  great  unfinished  projects  were 
carried  through.  As  we  have  shown,  the  storage  problem  be- 
came acute  only  after  the  armistice,  when  the  wasteful  field 
consumption  of  supplies  ceased  and  the  materials  coming  from 
the  war  factories  banked  up  in  this  country.  Every  warehouse 
and  depot  project  incomplete  on  the  day  of  the  armistice  was 
pressed  to  completion  thereafter  in  order  to  provide  shelter  for 
valuable  and  perishable  materials.  This  was  another  great 
branch  of  post-armistice  construction.  Add  to  these  the  con- 
tinued construction  of  hospitals  (which  had  to  be  prepared  to 
receive  the  thousands  of  wounded  men  in  France  on  the  day  of 
the  armistice),  and  it  becomes  evident  why  thousands  of  the 
war  builders  were  kept  on  the  job  after  the  war  itself  had 
come  to  an  end. 

The  fate  of  every  incomplete  army  construction  project  on 
the  day  of  the  armistice  was  submitted  to  the  Operations  Divi- 
sion of  the  General  Staff,  which  looked  at  the  percentage  of 
completion,  noted  whether  the  Government  owned  the  ground 
on  which  the  construction  was  going  forward,  studied  the  avail- 
ability of  the  building  for  commercial  use,  and  determined 
whether  it  was  needed  in  the  military  plans,  and  then  recom- 
mended that  the  construction  be  abandoned,  curtailed,  or 
completed.  In  general,  the  projects  abandoned  were  those  pro- 
viding additional  facilities  for  the  assembling  and  training 
of  troops  and  those  providing  plants  for  the  production  of 
destructive  munitions,  such  as  toxic  gas,  powder,  and  loaded 
shell.  Of  the  450  projects  incomplete  on  the  day  of  the  armi- 
stice, 182  were  abandoned  and  268  carried  through. 

The  completion  of  so  large  a  quantity  of  the  war  construc- 
tion after  the  armistice  enabled  the  Construction  Division  to 
go  through  the  demobilization  of  its  industry  without  accumu- 
lating large  stores  of  surplus  materials.  Although  in  form,  at 
any  rate,  the  Division  dealt  directly  only  with  contractors 
who  took  the  various  jobs,  actually  the  Division  itself  pro- 
cured the  lumber,  cement,  brick,  structural  steel,  roofing,  hard- 
ware, and  the  like,  for  the  builders.  The  demand  of  the  war 
construction  upon  the  supplies  of  building  materials  was  so 


26o  DEMOBILIZATION 

great  that  nothing  less  than  a  centralized  stimulation  and  con- 
trol of  the  entire  market  could  have  procured  the  materials  in 
the  quantities  needed.  The  Construction  Division's  Procure- 
ment Division  located  the  supplies  and  then  arranged  each 
building  contractor's  deals  for  them,  even  stipulating  the 
producers,  quantities,  and  the  prices  which  must  be  paid  for 
materials.  This  last  was  important,  because  the  war  builders 
worked  under  a  sharply  safeguarded  cost-plus  contract  form, 
and  therefore  the  Government  was  keenly  interested  in  what 
the  materials  cost.  In  addition  to  procuring  supplies  for  the 
contractors,  the  Procurement  Division  also  purchased  equip- 
ment for  the  war  buildings — heating,  ventilating,  and  power 
plants,  fire  extinguishers,  refrigeration  equipment,  boilers, 
engines,  and  machinery  of  many  sorts.  Its  purchases  ran  at  the 
rate  of  $2,000,000  a  day  in  the  early  autumn  of  1918. 

After  the  armistice  and  after  the  temporary  suspension  of 
effort  requested  in  order  to  give  the  Construction  Division  time 
in  which  to  take  stock  of  its  position,  the  production  of  build- 
ing materials  and  supplies  of  which  the  Government  would 
be  able  to  make  no  use  was  rapidly  terminated.  The  Procure- 
ment Division  was  made  up  of  experts  in  all  branches  of 
building  construction,  and  therefore  this  Division  was  made 
over  after  the  armistice  into  the  Construction  Division  Claims 
Board  for  liquidating  its  war  business  under  the  direction  of 
the  War  Department  Claims  Board.  In  six  months  practically 
all  the  terminated  contracts  had  been  finally  settled  by  this 
organization,  at  an  average  cancellation  cost  of  5  per  cent  of 
the  face  value  of  the  contracts. 

The  termination  of  supply  contracts  and  of  contracts  with 
constructors  of  buildings  not  needed  by  the  War  Department 
after  the  armistice,  left  the  Construction  Division  with  large 
quantities  of  supplies  on  its  hands.  But  these  were  by  no  means 
surplus  supplies.  The  completion  of  a  large  quantity  of  war 
construction  after  the  armistice  saved  the  Construction  Divi- 
sion from  having  to  solve  the  problem  of  disposing  of  much 
surplus.  Supplies  accumulated  for  the  terminated  jobs  were 
simply  diverted  to  those  ordered  completed  and  thus  utilized. 


BUILDINGS  AND  LANDS  261 

But  although  the  Division  had  no  large  quantity  of  build- 
ing supplies  to  sell,  it  was  charged,  after  the  armistice,  with  the 
duty  of  disposing  of  the  facilities  at  the  182  construction 
projects  which  were  terminated.  Many  of  these  projects  were 
large  ones,  those  in  this  category  being  for  the  most  part  train- 
ing camps  for  troops.  There  was  a  camp  shortage  in  1918,  and 
the  Construction  Division  was  doing  everything  in  its  power 
to  overcome  it.  We  were  sending  men  overseas  at  the  rate  of 
300,000  a  month;  and,  since  it  was  desirable  to  give  every 
overseas  soldier  at  least  six  months'  training,  that  implied 
camp  accommodations  for  1,800,000  men  in  the  United 
States.  The  actual  accommodations  provided  were  for  less  than 
1,370,000  troops.  In  1918,  after  the  augmented  rate  of  em- 
barkation became  a  fact,  new  training  camp  projects  were 
consequently  inaugurated  at  frequent  intervals.  Only  a  few 
days  before  the  armistice  the  Construction  Division  began  the 
construction  of  an  enormous  new  camp  which  was  to  specialize 
in  the  training  of  infantry.  All  the  national  guard  camps 
(sixteen  of  them)  and  most  of  the  special -purpose  camps, 
whether  completely  built  or  not,  were  condemned  after  the 
armistice  for  salvage.  Most  of  these  were  veritable  cities,  some 
of  them  large  enough  to  accommodate  40,000  men  each,  com- 
fortably— with  the  adverb  accented,  for  the  comfort  was  based 
on  such  substantial  (and  costly)  installations  as  water  and 
sanitation  systems,  electric  lighting,  pavements,  sidewalks,  and 
even  stores,  theatres,  and  gymnasiums.  It  was  the  task  of  the 
Construction  Division  to  dispose  of  these  cities  to  such  mem- 
bers of  the  public  as  cared  to  buy. 

A  city,  however,  is  something  more  than  an  accumulation  of 
buildings  and  other  tangible  facilities.  Quite  as  much  as  upon 
foundations  of  rock,  a  city  rests  upon  logic — the  logic  of  its 
location.  Naturally  the  Government  built  its  camps  upon 
cheap  land,  therefore  upon  land  not  in  demand  by  the  popula- 
tion, therefore  upon  land  not  so  located  as  to  make  it  a  logical 
place  for  a  city.  And  so,  although  it  was  thought  at  first  that 
perhaps  some  of  these  camps  might  prove  to  be  the  nuclei  of 
permanent  civilian  communities,  that  notion  soon  had  to  be 


262  DEMOBILIZATION 

abandoned  for  the  reason  that  few  civilian  movements  arose 
to  occupy  permanently  the  former  war  buildings.  An  attempt 
was  made,  and  still  is  being  made,  to  use  the  former  Nitro 
Powder  Plant  as  a  permanent  civilian  industrial  city,  and  one 
or  two  training  camps  in  the  South  have  been  held  together  by 
their  purchasers  with  the  idea  of  establishing  communities  on 
their  sites.  The  others,  however,  in  which  the  Government  had 
sunk  hundreds  of  millions  of  dollars,  were  sold  out  to  the 
wreckers,  who  bought  them  for  the  sake  of  salvaging  the 
building  materials. 

Now,  there  is  nothing  quite  so  second-hand  as  second-hand 
building  materials.  Boards  are  full  of  nail  holes  and  sometimes 
covered  with  faded  paint  or  disfiguring  marks.  Bricks  are 
soiled,  chipped,  and  worn,  and  conglomerated  with  stonelike 
mortar.  Hardware  and  metallic  fixtures  are  corroded  and  rusty. 
Such  materials  are  not  only  wreckage  and  junk,  but  not  even 
valuable  junk.  The  chief  cost  in  the  construction  of  a  training 
camp  was  the  labor  which  laid  the  brick,  installed  the  under- 
ground piping,  smoothed,  squared,  and  nailed  up  the  lumber, 
and  soldered  the  joints  in  the  plumbing.  All  that  labor  value 
was  lost  when  camps  were  salvaged  for  their  materials. 

Yet  this  was  not  the  only  loss  which  the  Government  was 
forced  to  sustain.  Practically  all  the  camps  were  originally 
located  on  leased  ground;  and  this  fact  implied  that  in  razing 
the  camps  the  Government  was  bound  to  restore  the  land  to  its 
original  condition,  or,  in  lieu  of  that,  to  pay  to  the  owners 
the  costs  of  restoration.  These  questions  of  property  damage 
greatly  complicated  the  demobilization  of  the  training  camps, 
because  the  amounts  of  damage  were  so  hard  to  ascertain. 
Concrete  roads  had  been  laid  across  what  were  originally  pas- 
tures; fertile  com  lands  were  crisscrossed  with  clay  ridges 
thrown  up  above  the  water  and  sewer  trenches.  On  the  other 
hand,  some  of  the  camp  improvements  had  drained  former 
swamps  and  reclaimed  them  for  cultivation,  and  such  benefits 
would  offset  damages  in  other  places.  It  was  out  of  the  question 
for  the  Government  to  attempt  to  settle  these  thousands  of 
cases  individually,  because  of  the  time  it  would  take;  and 


BUILDINGS  AND  LANDS  263 

therefore  it  was  stipulated  that  the  purchasers  of  the  camps 
must  assume  all  liabilities  for  property  damage  and  hold  the 
Government  harmless  from  claims  that  might  later  be  pressed 
in  the  Court  of  Claims.  Naturally  the  purchasers  made  allow- 
ances for  these  damages  in  their  bids,  and  wide  allowances,  too, 
since  the  extent  of  the  damages  was  largely  conjecture.  This 
consideration  further  depressed  the  prices  paid  by  the  pur- 
chasers. 

The  result  was  that  the  salvage  of  abandoned  army  camps 
brought  back  to  the  Government  only  a  small  fraction  of  the 
money  put  into  them.  Actually  in  scores  of  instances  it  would 
have  been  cheaper  for  the  Government  to  abandon  the  im- 
provements to  the  landowners  in  return  for  quit-claims  for  the 
property  damage.  Public  policy,  however,  prohibited  such  a 
short-cut  method.  Some  of  the  leased  sites  had  been  donated  to 
the  Government  before  the  armistice  at  the  nominal  rental  of 
$1.00  a  year  or  some  other  slight  sum;  but  afterwards  the 
chambers  of  commerce  and  other  civic  agencies  which  had  made 
these  concessions,  for  the  sake  of  securing  camps  near  their 
communities,  refused  to  renew  the  arrangements,  and  the  War 
Department  was  forced  to  pay  regular  rentals.  Here  was  a 
consideration  to  force  the  sale  of  the  camps  on  any  terms  pos- 
sible. The  chief  lesson  learned  from  the  war  construction  enter- 
prise was  that  the  Government  should  buy  and  not  lease  a  site 
when  the  value  of  the  improvements  is  to  exceed  the  value  of 
the  site  itself.  Only  by  holding  such  property  for  permanent 
use  or  gradual  sale  can  the  Government  get  value  received  for 
its  investment. 

In  general,  the  salvage  recovery  from  camps  and  other  in- 
stallations sold  after  the  armistice  amounted  to  about  15  per 
cent  of  the  money  invested  in  the  original  building  materials. 
All  labor  values  were  lost.  All  wastage  of  materials  in  con- 
struction and  demolition  was  loss.  Many  materials  such  as 
cement  and  concrete,  road  material,  roofing,  wood-stave  piping, 
sewer  piping,  and  so  on,  were  a  complete  loss.  The  attention  of 
the  reader  is  invited  to  some   typical   shrinkages  in  value. 


264  DEMOBILIZATION 


Project  Original  Cost                 Salvage  Recovery 

Camp  Beauregard  $4,300,000  $  43.000 

Camp  Bowie  3,400,000  110,000 

Camp  Hancock  6,000,000  75,ooo 

Camp  Logan  3,300,000  137,000 

Camp  Wadsworth  4,000,000  95,000 

Camp  Wheeler  3,200,000  144,000 


Note,  however,  that  in  disposing  of  these  camps,  the  Govern- 
ment retained  practically  all  the  storage  and  hospital  facilities. 

During  the  year  following  the  armistice  the  Construction 
Division  disposed  of  fourteen  national  guard  camps,  three 
embarkation  camps,  sixteen  special  and  regular  training  camps, 
four  flying  fields,  four  hospitals,  and  many  small  groups  of 
buildings.  For  these  the  Government  received  about  $4,215,- 
000.  In  addition,  parts  of  many  other  camps  were  sold;  also 
construction  materials  of  practically  every  sort. 

The  most  spectacular  accomplishment  of  the  Construction 
Division  before  the  armistice  was  the  building  of  the  canton- 
ments, the  primary  training  camps  which  housed  the  soldiers 
summoned  into  the  military  service  by  the  Selective  Service 
Law.  These  were  much  more  substantial  installations  than  the 
national  guard  camps,  the  salvaging  of  six  of  which  was  noted 
in  the  tabular  statement  above.  The  national  guard  camps  pro- 
vided only  tentage  for  the  shelter  of  troops,  whereas  the  canton- 
ments housed  their  inhabitants  in  stanch  wooden  barrack  build- 
ings. A  cantonment  cost  from  two  to  three  times  as  much  as 
a  national  guard  camp.  Yet,  on  three  months'  notice,  at  the 
beginning  of  which  not  even  the  sites  had  yet  been  selected  and 
acquired,  the  Construction  Division  prepared  sixteen  canton- 
ments ready  to  receive  the  first  inductives  called  to  the  colors. 

The  cantonments  originally  were  all  built  upon  leased 
ground.  It  was  evident  that,  if  the  Government  were  forced  to 
vacate  the  ground  to  the  owners,  the  cantonments,  salvaged 
for  their  building  materials,  would  bring  no  greater  recovery 
percentage  of  their  cost  than  did  the  tentage  camps.  The 
Government's  loss,   in  such   an  event,   on  each  cantonment 


BUILDINGS  AND  LANDS  265 

would  be  twice  or  three  times  what  it  proved  to  be  on  the 
national  guard  camps.  Before  the  end  of  the  war  was  in  sight 
the  Construction  Division  had  anticipated  demobilization  by 
presenting  a  plan  to  the  Secretary  of  War  for  the  purchase  of 
the  sites  of  the  cantonments.  Purchase  would  accomplish  sev- 
eral desirable  ends.  As  long  as  the  cantonments  were  in  use  it 
would  save  the  payment  of  rents.  After  the  war  was  over,  if  the 
cantonments  were  retained  by  the  Army,  it  would  give  the 
cantonments  their  full  use-value,  which  was  every  penny  they 
had  cost.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  the  decision  was  to  dispose  of 
them  after  the  advent  of  peace,  then  ownership  of  the  sites 
would  permit  the  Government  ( 1 )  to  market  the  materials 
gradually  and  avoid  beating  down  prices  by  glutting  the 
market;  or  (2)  to  sell  buildings  intact,  with  the  land  on 
which  they  stood;  or  (3)  to  sell  entire  cantonments  as  they 
stood,  together  with  title  to  the  lands.  Any  one  of  these 
methods  of  disposition  would  bring  a  far  greater  salvage 
return  than  the  forced  sale  of  the  materials  and  the  payment 
of  property  damages. 

In  March,  1919,  the  Assistant  Secretary  of  War  directed 
that  the  leased  sites  of  fourteen  of  the  cantonments — namely, 
Camps  Custer,  Devens,  Dix,  Dodge,  Gordon,  Grant,  Lee,  Jack- 
son, Meade,  Pike,  Sherman,  Taylor,  Travis,  and  Upton — be 
acquired  by  purchase.  The  investment  in  these  cantonments 
was  approximately  $155,000,000.  By  continuing  to  use  the 
cantonments,  the  War  Department  could  get  full  value  re- 
ceived for  the  money  expended.  By  salvaging  them  after  the 
manner  of  disposing  of  the  national  guard  camps,  the  Govern- 
ment might  recover  $4,000,000  at  the  outside  estimate.  By 
selling  the  materials  gradually  or  the  buildings  intact  with 
lands,  the  recovery  could  be  expected  to  run  as  high  as  $48,- 
000,000.  The  business  logic  of  the  proposition  was  irresistible. 

The  purchase  of  this  vast  quantity  of  land  was  undertaken 
by  the  Construction  Division.  After  the  commanding  officers 
at  the  cantonments  had  indicated  what  boundaries  should  be 
included,  the  Division  sent  out  its  field  forces — on  April  21, 
1919.  First  to  go  to  work  were  engineers  and  surveyors  to  fix 


266  DEMOBILIZATION 

accurate  boundaries  and  secure  complete  metes-and-bounds 
descriptions  of  the  properties.  Contracts  were  drawn  with 
various  responsible  title  companies  to  make  search  of  the  land 
titles  and  to  guarantee  them  with  title  insurance.  Next  fol- 
lowed acquisition  officers  who  closed  sale  contracts  with  the 
private  owners.  The  sale  contracts  were  finally  signed  in  behalf 
of  the  Government  by  competent  officers.  With  the  acquisition 
officers  traveled  disbursing  officers  of  the  Finance  Service  who 
stood  ready  to  pay  spot  cash  for  the  lands  the  moment  the 
sale  contracts  were  signed.  So  rapidly  was  this  work  carried 
on  that  in  two  months  the  Government  had  acquired  owner- 
ship to  more  than  half  the  area  on  which  the  fourteen  canton- 
ments stood.  A  year  later  about  55,000  acres  had  passed  in  fee 
simple  to  the  United  States  at  a  price  of  $6,762,000.  Con- 
siderable property  was  yet  unacquired;  but,  although  it  had 
been  estimated  that  the  sites  would  cost  ultimately  $9,657,000, 
the  indications  then  were  that  the  Government  would  secure 
them  for  not  more  than  $8, 1 1 5,000. 

It  was  found  to  be  impossible,  however,  to  secure  all  the 
property  so  simply  and  easily.  Some  owners  would  not  sell  at 
reasonable  prices;  other  owners  could  not  be  found;  still  others 
were  under  legal  disabilities  which  prevented  them  from  sell- 
ing. In  such  instances  the  recourse  of  the  Government  was  con- 
demnation of  the  lands.  Proceedings  were  instituted  eventu- 
ally to  condemn  some  22,000  acres  for  government  use.  The 
condemnation  proceedings  were  conducted  by  the  Department 
of  Justice,  which  found  this  work  to  be  one  of  great  magnitude. 

One  of  the  interesting  war  developments  in  the  United 
States  was  the  change  in  the  attitude  of  the  War  Department 
toward  real  estate.  Before  the  war  the  various  bureaus  and 
other  agencies  of  the  War  Department  acquired  their  own  real 
estate  by  lease  or  purchase  as  they  needed  it  and  as  they  could 
secure  authority  to  procure  it.  The  war  itself  resulted  in  an 
intense  demand  for  real  estate  by  the  War  Department  as  sites 
for  its  war  buildings  or  as  quarters  to  be  occupied  under  lease. 
Real  estate,  therefore,  came  to  be  regarded  as  a  commodity  in 
the  supply  of  the  Army;  just  as  much  a  commodity  as  food  or 


BUILDINGS  AND  LANDS  267 

ammunition.  And,  as  the  procurement  of  other  commodities 
was  eventually  administered  and  controlled  by  a  centralized 
agency,  so  the  centralized  procurement  of  real  estate  was 
placed  in  the  hands  of  a  new  organization  called  the  Real 
Estate  Service. 

The  Real  Estate  Service  acted  as  the  Army's  real  estate 
agent.  The  various  bureaus  still  originated  the  projects  for 
the  acquisition  of  property,  and  then  the  Real  Estate  Service 
acquired  the  property  as  agent  for  the  bureaus.  The  Service 
was  composed  of  experts  who  saw  to  it  that  deeds  and  leases 
were  correctly  drawn  and  that  the  Government  made  good 
bargains. 

The  armistice,  if  anything,  meant  increased  effort  for  the 
Real  Estate  Section,  since  the  problem  of  the  storage  of  sur- 
plus supplies  was  to  be  solved  only  by  the  acquisition  of  space. 
It  was  also  necessary  to  dispense  with  high-priced  locations, 
essential  as  they  had  been  during  the  actual  hostilities,  and  to 
substitute  more  economical  facilities.  Many  of  the  War  De- 
partment's war  factories  had  been  built  on  leased  sites,  and  it 
was  necessary  to  purchase  these  sites  wherever  it  was  expedient 
for  the  Department  to  retain  the  factory  as  a  preparedness 
asset  or  where  it  was  good  business  to  buy  the  land  in  order  to 
sell  the  factory  advantageously. 

Although  few  obstacles  had  been  thrown  in  the  way  of  the 
War  Department  in  purchasing  property,  it  was  discovered 
after  the  armistice  that,  because  of  existing  and  obsolete  laws, 
it  was  most  difficult  to  sell  any.  Up  to  the  declaration  of  war 
the  law  which  controlled  this  function  provided  that  war  de- 
partment lands  useless  for  military  purposes  should  be  sold  hy 
the  Secretary  of  the  Interior.  When  this  law  was  enacted 
(  1884)  most  of  the  lands  occupied  by  the  Army  had  come  from 
the  public  domain,  and  it  was  logical  to  turn  them  back  to  that 
source  when  the  War  Department  was  through  with  them.  In 
May,  1917,  Congress  authorized  the  War  Department  itself 
to  sell  national  guard  target  ranges.  In  July,  1918,  Congress 
authorized  the  President  to  sell,  through  the  head  of  any 
'Executive  Department^  lands  acquired  after  the  declaration  of 


268  DEMOBILIZATION 

war  against  Germany  to  be  the  sites  of  war  factories.  In  July, 
1919,  Congress  authorized  the  sale  under  identical  conditions 
of  lands  acquired  for  storage  purposes.  These,  however,  were 
the  only  exceptions  granted  to  the  original  rule.  In  fact,  when 
the  War  Department  went  about  the  purchase  of  the  fourteen 
cantonment  sites  for  the  possible  purpose  of  selling  these  lands 
later  and  thus  getting  better  prices  for  the  buildings  on  them,  it 
did  so  with  the  knowledge  that  it  would  take  a  special  act  of 
Congress  to  authorize  such  a  sale. 

Congress,  without  warning,  attached  a  rider  to  the  appro- 
priation bill  which  was  approved  on  July  11,  1919,  forbidding 
the  expenditure  of  any  more  money  at  all  in  the  purchase  of 
real  estate  by  the  Army  except  at  the  national  guard  camps  or 
at  the  cantonments  in  use  before  November  11,  1918,  and  also 
except  where  the  purchase  of  sites  of  industrial  plants  was 
necessary  to  protect  the  Government's  interests.  The  Secretary 
of  War  ruled  that  the  fourteen  cantonments  then  being  pur- 
chased were  exempt  from  this  inhibition,  but  the  law  abruptly 
put  an  end  to  projects  of  the  Real  Estate  Service  to  buy  some 
300,000  acres  at  a  cost  of  $8,000,000.  At  that  time  the  Service 
was  buying  115,000  acres  of  land  at  Columbus,  Georgia,  to 
serve  as  an  infantry  school  of  arms,  120,000  acres  at  Fayette- 
ville.  North  Carolina,  to  be  an  artillery  range,  and  several 
other  large  acreages  for  various  military  purposes.  The  project 
to  acquire  Camp  Humphreys,  the  Engineers'  camp  in  Virginia 
near  the  city  of  Washington,  about  4,000  acres,  was  allowed 
to  go  through. 

On  the  first  day  of  the  armistice  the  War  Department  was  a 
party  to  leases  obligating  it  to  pay  $13,000,000  in  rentals 
annually.  By  the  end  of  December,  1919,  the  Real  Estate 
Service  had  made  a  large  net  reduction  in  the  number  of  leases, 
and  the  annual  rent  bill  had  dropped  to  approximately  $5,000,- 
000,  although  in  that  interval  the  Service  had  acquired  by 
lease  hundreds  of  millions  of  square  feet  of  new  storage  space. 


Photo  from   Construction  Division 

WEST  INDIAN  LABORERS  EMBARKING  FOR  HOME 


Photo  from   Construction  Division 

VIEW  OF  CAMP  SHERMAN 


Photo  from  Quartermaster  Department 

IN  AN  ARMY  RETAIL  STORE 


Photo  from   Quartermaster  Department 

CUSTOMERS  AT  OPENING  OF  ARMY  RETAIL  STORE 


CHAPTER  XVII 
SELLING  THE  SURPLUS 

IN  our  earlier  chapters,  frequent  and  more  or  less  extended 
references  have  been  made  to  the  disposition  of  surplus 
property  acquired  by  the  various  branches  of  the  Army 
during  the  World  War.  In  so  far  as  these  references  have  been 
to  surpluses  with  the  American  Expeditionary  Forces,  we  have 
aimed  to  make  the  statements  complete ;  but  the  references  to 
sales  of  the  surplus  military  property  accumulated  within  the 
United  States  have  been  only  incidental,  inserted  merely  to 
make  plain  to  the  reader  the  extent  of  the  tasks  of  the  various 
production  bureaus  after  the  armistice.  This  may  have  seemed 
haphazard  and  confusing  treatment  of  what  was  one  of  the 
most  interesting  and  important  phases  of  the  demobilization 
of  war  industry.  We  are  therefore  taking  occasion  in  this  chap- 
ter to  consider  this  phase — the  disposal  of  the  domestic  sur- 
pluses of  war  materials — as  a  whole  and  in  such  detail  as  may 
be  expedient. 

That  same  tendency  toward  centralization  which  succeeded 
in  placing  under  one  direction  the  procurement  of  all  war 
supplies  and,  after  the  armistice,  the  liquidation  of  the  Govern- 
ment's business  engagements,  also  brought  about  a  unified 
control  of  the  sale  of  the  surplus  materials.  Shortly  after  the 
armistice  there  was  set  up  in  the  Division  of  Purchase,  Storage, 
and  Traffic  a  Sales  Branch  under  an  officer  called  the  Director 
of  Sales.  Just  as,  after  the  formation  of  the  "overhead"  busi- 
ness organization  known  as  the  Division  of  Purchase,  Storage, 
and  Traffic,  the  various  production  bureaus  still  continued  to 
procure  most  of  their  own  supplies,  but  now  under  the  control 
and  authority  of  the  Director  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic, 
so  after  the  armistice  these  same  bureaus  sold  and  otherwise 
disposed  of  the  surpluses  they  had  acquired,  but  under  the 


270  DEMOBILIZATION 

supervision  of  the  Director  of  Sales.  With  the  exception  of  a 
few  sales  made  directly  with  various  foreign  governments  and 
companies  (property  valued  at  $63,450,000  going  in  these 
transactions),  the  Sales  Branch  itself  engaged  in  no  selling, 
but  merely  directed  the  selling  activities  of  the  operating 
bureaus. 

It  is  impossible  here  even  to  give  an  estimate  of  the  value  of 
the  surplus  materials  left  on  the  hands  of  the  War  Depart- 
ment after  the  termination  of  the  war  industry,  for  the  reason 
that  the  War  Department  itself  has  never  been  able  to  arrive  at 
an  estimate.  The  subject  has  been  so  vast,  so  intricate,  and  so 
complicated  by  the  changing  of  personnel  and  the  evolution  of 
organization,  that  it  has  seemed  to  be  a  hopeless  task  to  attempt 
an  inventory  of  the  surplus  property  sold  and  for  sale.  We  can, 
however,  gain  some  idea  of  the  quantities  of  it.  It  is  estimated 
that  the  armistice  found  the  Army  with  a  surplus  of  war  sup- 
plies on  hand  of  a  value  of  $2,000,000,000.  This  investment 
represented  goods  actually  produced  by  American  industry  up 
to  November  11,  1918,  in  the  maintenance  of  a  force  of  4,000,- 
000  men  and  in  anticipation  of  a  force  of  nearly  5,000,000  in 
1919.  But  this,  mind  you,  was  surplus  within  the  United 
States.  On  the  same  date — the  day  of  the  armistice — -the 
A.  E.  F.,  through  importations  from  the  United  States  and 
through  its  own  foreign  purchases,  had  built  up  a  surplus  of 
supplies  worth  $1,330,000,000  over  and  above  what  it  would 
return  to  the  war  reserves  at  home  and  outside  of  what  it 
would  consume  while  resting  on  European  soil  during  de- 
mobilization. Thus  we  have  the  figure  $3,330,000,000  as 
representing  the  value  of  the  surplus  supplies,  munitions,  on 
hand  when  the  active  fighting  ceased. 

But  this  is  only  the  beginning  of  the  complete  inventory; 
this  was  merely  the  surplus  existing  on  November  11,  1918. 
War  industry,  under  the  policy  of  terminating  it  by  graduating 
a  declining  production,  still  had  weeks  and  months  to  go  on 
producing  goods,  for  most  of  which  there  was  no  war  use.  This 
dwindling  manufacture  by  thousands  of  factories  with  millions 
of  employees  added  to  the  surpluses  materials  worth  many 


SELLING  THE  SURPLUS  271 

hundreds  of  millions.  And  still  the  tale  is  not  told.  War  in- 
dustry had  been  fostered  by  huge  federal  investments  in  build- 
ings and  machinery.  These  facilities,  too,  existed  as  surplus 
when  the  industry  ended.  This  great  accumulation  was  largely 
augmented  by  the  machinery  and  other  manufacturing  facili- 
ties taken  over  by  the  Government  in  the  settlement  with  the 
war  contractors.  The  Government  had  purchased  heavily  of 
raw  materials  of  various  sorts,  quantities  of  which  remained 
as  surplus  after  the  armistice.  In  liquidating  the  war  industry 
it  added  further  to  its  stores  of  raw  materials  and  took  over, 
besides,  a  great  mass  of  semi-finished  materials  in  all  stages  of 
completion.  When  upon  this  heap  we  pile  a  great  part  of  all 
the  war  building  construction,  and  on  that  the  additional  sur- 
pluses automatically  created  when  polity  in  Congress  and  in 
the  executive  offices  made  cut  after  cut  in  the  size  of  the  per- 
manent Army,  then  we  are  approximating  the  total  of  the 
surplus. 

This  was  all  wealth,  the  true  substance  of  the  nation,  its 
resources  fabricated  by  its  labor  for  the  special  purposes  of 
war;  and,  with  the  war  over,  with  little  or  no  demand  or  use 
for  these  special  materials,  they  could  be  disposed  of  only  at  a 
shocking  sacrifice.  Again,  we  cannot  estimate  the  extent  of  the 
shrinkage,  but  we  can  indicate  it.  Up  to  March  1,  1920,  the 
War  Department  had  disposed  of  surplus  property  which  had 
cost  it  $2,600,000,000.  For  this  it  had  received  $1,633,000,- 
000.  The  recovery,  therefore,  was  64  per  cent  of  the  cost;  the 
loss,  36  per  cent.  The  shrinkage  in  values  is  one  of  the  wastes 
which  any  nation  must  contemplate  and  accept  when  it  sets 
forth  to  wage  war  on  the  modem  scale.  The  nation  can  get 
value  received  for  the  cost  of  its  munitions  only  by  using  them 
in  war. 

The  largest  of  American  companies,  the  United  States  Steel 
Corporation,  in  1918,  its  busiest  year,  did  a  gross  business  of 
$1,745,000,000.  The  value  of  the  surplus  munitions  produced 
before  the  armistice  was  nearly  twice  as  great  as  that.  The 
Steel  Corporation,  however,  produced  only  a  few  dozen  or 
few  score  sorts  of  products.  The  sorts  of  goods  and  materials 


272  DEMOBILIZATION 

to  be  disposed  of  by  the  Sales  Branch  were  in  number  about 
250,000,  and  this  range  embraced  goods  known  in  many 
branches  of  trade.  The  Steel  Corporation  and  other  great  com- 
panies usually  sell  to  a  relatively  small  group  of  customers, 
who  take  the  products  in  wholesale  quantities.  The  market 
which  the  Sales  Branch  entered  consisted  of  the  entire  United 
States,  with  1 10,000,000  possible  buyers;  for  part  of  the  prob- 
lem was  to  dispose  of  surplus  materials  by  retail  sale  to  the 
public.  All  in  all,  this  may  be  regarded  as  the  greatest  mer- 
chandizing enterprise  ever  undertaken  in  America. 

The  250,000  catalogue  items  in  the  sales  list  were  divided 
roughly  into  seven  commodity  groups,  as  follows :  ( l ) 
railway  and  building  materials  and  contractors'  equipment; 
(2)  manufacturing  plants  and  plant  sites;  (3)  machine  tools; 

(4)  vehicles  and  airplanes,  including  spare  engines  and  parts; 

(5)  quartermaster  stores;  (6)  ordnance  and  technical  equip- 
ment, including  office  equipment;  and  (7)  raw  materials,  scrap 
metal,  and  waste  materials. 

It  was  recognized  at  the  outset  that  to  throw  on  the  market 
vast  quantities  of  supplies  and  materials  in  all  these  seven 
categories  was  to  court  disaster  to  the  industrial  situation. 
Business  and  industry  immediately  after  the  armistice  were  in 
a  ticklish  position.  They  faced  the  complete  transition  from 
the  war  to  the  peace  basis,  an  uncharted  region  through  which 
it  seemed  likely  that  they  could  go  safely  only  under  the  wisest 
of  guidance.  If,  in  addition  to  its  inevitable  troubles  of  recon- 
struction, industry  were  to  have  to  face  cutthroat  competition 
with  the  surpluses  of  the  very  goods  its  own  mills  had  created 
during  the  war,  it  was  evident  that  the  difficulties  of  the  tran- 
sition might  be  doubled. 

To  safeguard  business  as  much  as  possible  and  still  dispose 
of  the  surplus  materials,  the  War  Department  adopted  certain 
general  principles  or  policies.  The  first  of  these  was  that  the 
general  Government,  through  its  several  departments  and  in 
the  public  work  which  the  departments  were  doing,  should 
utilize  all  the  surplus  war  materials  they  could  absorb.  The 
second  and  more  important  was  to  sell  all  general  commodities 


SELLING  THE  SURPLUS  273 

to  the  public  through  the  medium  of  the  industries  which  had 
produced  these  commodities  and  thus  to  avoid  disastrous 
breaks  in  market  prices — even,  sometimes,  to  sustain  prices. 

There  was  widespread  disapproval  of  this  latter  policy.  The 
public  for  months  had  been  stung  and  irritated  by  prices  which 
many  regarded  as  the  exactions  of  profiteers;  and  now  at  last, 
with  huge  stocks  of  supplies  on  hand  which  had  to  be  sold  or 
lost,  the  people  anticipated  a  dumping  which  would  smash 
down  prices  and  bring  about  the  discomfiture  of  those  who  had 
seemingly  victimized  them.  But  this  was  not  to  be.  The  Gov- 
ernment adopted  the  view  that  it  was  better  to  have  the  high 
(but  normally  declining)  prices  and  to  keep  the  wheels  of 
industry  turning  than  to  risk  a  collapse  of  prices  that  might 
bring  with  it  general  unemployment  and  business  stagnation. 

Later  on,  when  it  had  become  evident  that  business  was 
making  a  safe  passage  through  the  reconstruction  period,  large 
stocks  of  clothing  and  food  supplies  were  sold  directly  to  con- 
sumers at  prices  considerably  below  the  market  averages. 

Particularly  in  raw  materials  the  policy  of  sale  through,  or 
in  cooperation  with,  the  industry  affected  by  the  sale  worked 
as  the  Government  had  expected  it  to  work.  The  War  Depart- 
ment found  itself  after  the  armistice  with  a  surplus  of  125,- 
000,000  board  feet  of  soft  lumber  over  and  above  what  it 
would  need  in  completing  the  various  unterminated  con- 
struction projects.  This  was  lumber  enough  to  build  5,000 
houses.  To  have  dumped  this  on  the  market  would  have 
paralyzed  a  large  part  of  the  lumbering  industry  until  the 
market  had  absorbed  the  army  lumber.  Accordingly  the  War 
Department  entered  into  a  contract  with  the  authorized  repre- 
sentatives of  the  lumber  industry  whereby  it  was  agreed  that 
the  lumber  should  be  marketed  gradually  and  at  prices  fixed 
by  agreement  between  the  Government  and  the  industry. 
Under  this  arrangement  the  surplus  was  all  sold  without  dis- 
turbance to  the  industry  and  at  prices  which  brought  a  good 
return  to  the  Government. 

In  the  spring  of  1919  the  Government  had  on  hand  a  surplus 
of  something  more  than  100,000,000  pounds  of  copper.  The 


274  DEMOBILIZATION 

copper  industry  was  in  a  serious  plight.  The  producers  had  on 
hand  a  surplus  of  1,000,000,000  pounds,  but  still  they  were 
keeping  the  mines,  smelters,  and  refineries  running  to  prevent 
unemployment  and  in  the  expectation  that  the  resumption  of 
normal  business  would  soon  create  a  demand  for  copper.  Any 
dumping  of  the  war  department  surplus  most  certainly  would 
have  closed  the  mines.  Instead  of  that,  the  Government  sold 
the  entire  surplus  back  to  the  producers.  The  industry  con- 
tinued in  operation,  and  the  Government  received  an  average 
of  seventeen  cents  a  pound  for  its  copper,  a  fair  recovery. 

The  War  Department's  surplus  of  161,000,000  pounds  of 
sulphur  was  sold  through  the  industry.  At  the  armistice  the 
Government  had  on  hand  some  600,000  tons  of  nitrate  of  soda 
imported  from  Chile  for  the  powder  factories.  About  half  of 
this  was  retained  as  a  war  reserve.  The  Department  of  Agri- 
culture disposed  of  125,000  tons  of  it  to  farmers  for  use  as 
fertilizer.  About  142,000  tons  was  sold  for  the  War  Depart- 
ment at  market  prices  by  the  nitrate  importers  who  had  sup- 
plied the  commodity  to  the  Government  in  the  first  place.  A 
stock  of  59,000  tons  of  nitrate  in  Chile,  the  property  of  the 
American  Government,  was  brought  to  the  United  States  and 
sold  by  the  importers  on  the  same  terms.  Approximately  730,- 
000  bales  of  cotton  linters  in  the  war  department  surplus  are 
being  used  by  the  commercial  powder  industry  on  such  terms 
as  will  return  to  the  Government  from  one-third  to  one-half 
the  original  cost  of  the  linters.  A  surplus  of  66,000,000  pounds 
of  ammonium  nitrate  was  sold  at  prices  which  reimbursed  the 
War  Department  to  the  extent  of  about  one-third  its  war-time 
cost. 

It  should  be  borne  in  mind  that  all  these  sales  were  actually 
consummated  by  the  production  bureaus  in  whose  hands  the 
supplies  remained  as  surplus  after  the  armistice,  the  Sales 
Branch  merely  coordinating  the  sales  and  approving  the  terms. 
It  will  be  impracticable  here  to  go  into  the  details  of  the  salvage 
and  sales  activities  of  all  the  bureaus,  but  enough  can  be  told 
to  illustrate  the  ingenuity  and  business  enterprise  employed  in 
disposing  of  the  great  war  surpluses.  As  the  occasion  demanded, 


SELLING  THE  SURPLUS  275 

the  government  salesmen  had  to  be  merchants,  barterers,  auc- 
tioneers, and  even  partners  with  commercial  organizations. 

The  production  bureaus  were  organized  for  their  salvage 
operations  precisely  as  they  had  been  for  manufacturing  the 
supplies  and,  later,  for  liquidating  the  business  arrangements 
with  the  contractors.  Those  which  had  created  manufac- 
turing districts  before  the  armistice,  afterwards  established 
district  salvage  boards  to  take  over  and  dispose  of  the  surpluses 
accumulated  by  the  district  claims  boards  in  their  settlements 
with  the  contractors.  These  district  salvage  boards,  in  turn, 
were  subsidiary  to  the  main  bureau  salvage  boards,  which,  in 
turn,  reported  to  the  Sales  Branch  of  the  Division  of  Purchase, 
Storage,  and  Traffic.  The  surpluses  of  ordnance  materials,  for 
instance,  were  handled  by  the  Ordnance  Salvage  Board  through 
its  district  salvage  boards,  and  the  same  system  obtained  in 
the  Air  Service  and  under  the  Director  of  Purchase.  The  other 
bureaus  disposed  of  their  surpluses  through  central  salvage 
boards  in  Washington. 

Perhaps  the  chief  challenge  to  the  ingenuity  of  the  govern- 
ment salesman  was  that  offered  by  the  ordnance  surpluses,  for 
these  were  probably  the  most  highly  specialized  of  all  military 
supplies;  yet  it  was  often  the  task  of  the  Ordnance  Salvage 
Board  to  find  civilian  needs  to  which  these  supplies  could  be 
adapted.  Great  commercial  successes  have  sometimes  been 
scored  by  those  able  to  develop  new  uses,  and  therefore  new 
markets,  for  the  goods  they  manufactured.  In  like  fashion  the 
ordnance  salvers,  by  taking  thought,  could  sometimes  convert 
what  had  been  regarded  as  junk  into  merchandise  for  which 
there  was  a  brisk  demand  at  good  prices. 

These  activities  took  the  salesmen  far  afield.  They  disposed 
of  lumber  to  the  Panama  Canal  operators,  sold  nitrate  to  the 
Government  of  Holland,  converted  the  great  ammonium 
nitrate  plant  at  Perryville  into  a  hospital  operated  by  the 
Public  Health  Service  for  the  benefit  of  disabled  ex-service 
men,  transferred  tin  to  the  Navy  Department,  and  demon- 
strated to  the  Department  of  Agriculture  that  the  containers  in 
which  it  had  been  intended  to  ship  trench  mortar  shell  could 


276  DEMOBILIZATION 

serve  equally  well  as  containers  of  dehydrated  vegetables. 
They  disposed  of  rope  to  the  Department  of  Agriculture.  They 
sold  a  thousand  revolvers  to  the  police  force  of  Washington. 
To  the  federal  road-builders  they  turned  over  trucks  and 
smokeless  powder  and  trinitrotoluol  to  be  used  as  blasting 
explosive. 

One  of  the  largest  single  undertakings  in  ordnance  salvage 
was  the  disposal  of  manufacturing  plants  either  built  outright 
or  equipped  with  machinery  by  the  Government.  There  were 
some  300  of  these,  and  the  Government's  investment  in  them 
was  practically  $525,000,000.  The  array  included  cannon  and 
gun-carriage  plants,  shell-loading  plants,  powder  works,  chemi- 
cal and  acid  plants,  toluol  plants,  small-arms  factories,  ammu- 
nition factories,  nitrate-fixation  plants,  and  numerous  shell- 
making  plants.  In  the  liquidation  of  the  ordnance  industry 
large  additional  quantities  of  ordnance  production  machinery, 
both  new  and  used,  fell  into  the  hands  of  the  Government. 
All  of  it,  beyond  the  selections  retained  in  the  military  re- 
serves, had  to  be  sold.  During  the  first  year  after  the  armistice 
the  sales  of  ordnance  plants  and  machinery  brought  in  a  return 
of  over  $70,000,000.  (Manufacturing  facilities  worth  double 
that  amount  had  either  been  stored  or  installed  at  the  various 
arsenals,  or  else  had  been  turned  over  to  other  departments  of 
the  Government.)  In  the  spring  of  1920  half  the  vast  accumu- 
lation of  ordnance  plants  and  machinery  had  been  disposed  of. 

The  most  spectacular  sale  accomplished  in  this  branch  of 
ordnance  salvage  was  that  of  the  smokeless  powder  plant  at 
Nitro,  West  Virginia.  This  plant  was  a  self-contained  town, 
with  three  square  miles  of  land  in  its  site,  with  houses  for 
20,000  people,  theatres,  schools,  churches,  stores,  electric  lights, 
paved  streets,  gas,  a  telephone  system,  water,  and  other 
modem  improvements.  The  Director  of  Sales  himself  con- 
ducted the  negotiations  whereby  the  entire  establishment  was 
sold  en  bloc  to  a  development  corporation,  which  planned  to 
resell  the  establishment  piecemeal  to  manufacturers  and  thus 
create  a  permanent  industrial  city  at  Nitro.  The  corporation 
paid  a  flat  price  to  the  Government  for  the  Nitro  plant  and  in 


SELLING  THE  SURPLUS  277 

addition  admitted  the  Government  as  a  partner  in  the  profits. 
Several  companies  have  already  occupied  factory  buildings 
there.  The  Ordnance  Salvage  Board  maintained  representa- 
tives at  Nitro  to  approve  the  resales  as  they  were  made. 

The  Ordnance  Department  took  over  from  the  producers 
after  the  armistice  large  quantities  of  steel  in  process  of  being 
made  into  artillery  shell.  A  great  deal  of  this  steel  consisted  of 
finished  and  semi-finished  parts  for  shell.  No  matter  how  much 
labor  had  been  expended  on  these  shell  parts,  their  only  value 
commercially  was  as  melting  stock.  The  users  of  steel  evidently 
expected  to  be  able  to  pick  up  the  Government's  surplus  stock 
of  it  after  the  armistice  for  a  song:  the  highest  bids  for  the 
first  offerings  of  it  on  the  market  were  only  about  $12  a  ton. 
The  ordnance  salvers  cannily  decided  not  to  sell  at  such  prices 
and,  except  for  some  trifling,  but  advantageous,  sales,  did 
nothing  about  it  until  the  summer  of  1919.  By  that  time  the 
commercial  revival  began  to  make  itself  felt  in  the  demand  for 
steel,  the  prices  of  which  were  further  enhanced  by  an  im- 
pending strike  in  the  steel  industry.  Then  it  was  that  the 
wisdom  of  holding  on  to  the  steel  stocks  became  evident.  The 
sale  of  shell  steel  was  handled  directly  by  the  Ordnance  Sal- 
vage Board,  which,  after  the  prices  rose,  dealt  only  with  heavy 
purchasers.  The  average  price  paid  to  the  Government  for  this 
steel  was  about  $30  a  ton.  The  Salvage  Board  handled  about 
1,000,000  tons  of  it. 

There  were  also  large  surpluses  of  nonferrous  metals, — 
copper,  zinc,  lead,  tin,  antimony,  and  nickel, — the  stocks  in- 
cluding nearly  20,000  ounces  of  platinum,  which  sold,  it  may 
be  noted,  for  an  average  price  of  $105  an  ounce — just  about 
what  it  had  cost.  The  copper,  as  we  have  seen,  went  back  to  the 
producers  at  a  fair  price.  The  Board  sold  65,000,000  pounds  of 
zinc  at  an  average  of  eight  cents  a  pound.  The  surplus  of  brass 
amounted  to  135,000,000  pounds,  and  this  has  been  selling  at 
good  prices.  During  the  year  following  the  armistice  the  salvers 
disposed  of  nonferrous  metals  worth  $40,000,000. 

The  salvers  had  to  use  their  ingenuity  in  order  to  dispose  of 
the  surplus  cupro-nickel  advantageously.  Cupro-nickel  is  an 


278  DEMOBILIZATION 

alloy  of  copper  and  nickel  which  is  used  in  making  jackets  for 
small-arms  bullets,  but  the  metal  has  no  commercial  use.  The 
Government  was  able  to  secure  not  a  single  bid  for  any  of  its 
large  surplus  of  cupro-nickel.  The  alloy  is  too  tough  for 
ordinary  metal-working  machinery.  The  ordnance  salvers  first 
proposed  that  this  metal  be  used  at  the  Mint  in  making  five- 
cent  pieces,  but  the  surplus  of  it  was  so  large  that  it  would  have 
taken  many  years  to  consume  it  all  in  this  use.  The  experi- 
menters then  took  hold  and  found  that,  by  melting  cupro- 
nickel  and  further  alloying  it  with  zinc,  they  could  produce 
German  silver,  a  commodity  for  which  there  is  extensive  in- 
dustrial use.  This  fact  was  demonstrated  to  the  market,  and  the 
first  result  was  a  bid  for  5,000,000  pounds  of  cupro-nickel  at 
a  favorable  price. 

An  even  more  conspicuous  example  of  resourcefulness  on  the 
part  of  the  ordnance  salvage  forces  was  the  sale  of  the  so- 
called  cartridge  cloth.  The  Ordnance  Department  was  an  ex- 
tensive war  consumer  of  textiles  of  many  kinds.  Silk,  cotton, 
wool,  felt,  and  linen  are  used  in  numerous  forms  in  the  pro- 
duction of  ordnance  supplies.  The  quantities  acquired  during 
the  war  may  be  estimated  from  the  fact  that  the  surpluses  left 
after  the  armistice  brought  on  sale  close  to  $25,000,000.  In 
the  surplus  of  textile  goods  was  a  considerable  yardage  of 
what  was  called  cartridge  cloth ;  and  it  must  be  said  that  at  the 
outset  none  of  the  excess  ordnance  supplies  seemed  to  be  so 
hopeless  as  a  salvaging  proposition,  so  certain  to  account  for  a 
large  loss  of  investment,  as  this  stock  of  cartridge  cloth. 

The  cartridge  cloth  was  used  during  the  war  to  make  bags  to 
be  filled  with  the  smokeless  powder  used  as  the  propelling 
charges  for  guns  of  the  larger  calibers.  The  cloth  was  made  of 
silk,  for  the  reason  that  silk  alone  among  fabrics  bums  per- 
fectly and  leaves  no  ash  to  smut  the  barrel  of  a  gun.  Cotton,  in 
contrast,  or  any  other  fabric,  is  likely  to  leave  charred  pieces 
of  itself  smouldering  in  the  breech  of  a  gun  after  a  shot;  and 
these  smouldering  pieces  may  touch  off  the  new  powder  charge 
prematurely  and  kill  or  maim  the  men  serving  the  gun.  More- 
over, silk  alone  does  not  cause  a  flash  at  the  muzzle  of  the  gun 


I 


SELLING  THE  SURPLUS  279 

when  the  shot  is  fired.  Such  flashes  at  night  betray  the  gun's 
position  to  the  enemy. 

But  though  cartridge  cloth  was  made  of  pure  silk,  what  a 
silk  it  was  I  Naturally,  to  keep  down  its  cost,  it  was  woven  of 
the  cheapest  silk  materials  possible  to  obtain.  It  was  made  of 
what  were  practically  the  by-products  of  silk-weaving — noils 
and  waste  silk.  Noils  are  cut  cocoons,  immature  cocoons,  and 
combings  from  the  outsides  of  cocoons.  The  woof  of  cartridge 
cloth  was  made  from  silk  noils  and  the  warp  from  waste  silk. 
All  raw  silk  is  filled  with  a  natural  gum,  which  in  commercial 
processes  is  boiled  out  before  the  silk  is  woven.  Since  this  gum 
did  not  impair  the  fabric  for  use  in  guns  (the  gum  gave  perfect 
combustion  and  left  no  ash),  it  was  left  in  the  raw  material  in 
order  to  keep  down  the  cost  of  the  fabric.  In  order  to  facilitate 
the  manufacture  of  cloth  from  noils,  the  noils  were  carded, 
combed,  and  spun  in  oil,  oil  not  being  objectionable  in  the 
cloth.  The  result  was  a  greasy,  dark  colored,  rough  cloth,  look- 
ing like  oily  gunny  sacking,  a  fabric  about  as  unalluring  as  any 
that  could  be  imagined.  And  it  cost  the  Government  on  the 
average  seventy-two  cents  a  yard.  At  the  time  of  the  armistice 
the  Ordnance  Department  had  on  hand  about  22,000,000 
yards  of  it.  Most  of  this  quantity  was  set  aside  as  a  war  reserve. 
The  rest  was  offered  for  sale.  The  best  offer  for  it  was  twelve 
and  one-half  cents  a  yard.  The  Government,  therefore,  faced  a 
considerable  loss. 

The  ordnance  salvers  were  not  content  to  swallow  this  loss. 
The  Salvage  Board  obtained  $20,000  with  which  to  experi- 
ment with  the  silk.  An  expert  silk  maker  in  the  Sales  Branch 
then  tried  boiling  out  the  gum  and  oil  and  otherwise  processing 
the  fabric,  after  which  he  bleached,  dyed,  printed,  and  napped 
it.  The  result  was  a  beautiful  fabric,  suitable  for  outer  gar- 
ments for  both  men  and  women,  and  for  millinery,  drapery, 
and  upholstery.  Beautiful  color  effects  were  obtained  with  it 
by  certain  silk-finishing  companies.  With  this  demonstration 
before  the  trade,  the  Salvage  Board  again  asked  for  bids,  and 
this  time  received  a  number  of  them,  offering  prices  ranging 
from  thirty-one  cents  a  yard  to  forty.  This  still  was  not  enough 


28o  DEMOBILIZATION 

for  the  salvage  salesmen,  who  went  out  and  negotiated  a  con- 
tract with  two  companies — the  Bush  Terminal  Company  of 
New  York  and  the  McLane  Silk  Company  of  Turners  Falls, 
Massachusetts — which  netted  the  Government  eighty-five  and 
a  half  cents  a  yard,  plus  half  the  profits  received  from  the  sale 
of  the  fabric.  A  considerable  quantity  of  the  silk  was  sold  under 
this  arrangement. 

The  expenses  of  the  Ordnance  Salvage  Board  were  less  than 
6  per  cent  of  the  money  received  from  sales  and  transfers.  This 
sales  cost  compares  favorably  with  similar  costs  in  the  mercan- 
tile world. 

The  fact  that  a  large  part  of  the  money  spent  by  the  Air 
Service  during  the  war  was  represented  after  the  armistice  by 
finished  airplanes  and  airplane  engines  precluded  any  con- 
siderable recoupment  of  the  war  expenditures  from  sales  of 
surplus  materials  afterwards,  since,  at  present,  planes  and 
engines  have  small  commercial  utility.  Aviation  engines  are  too 
light  and  too  powerful  for  ordinary  tasks,  and  no  real  market 
for  airplanes  has  yet  existed  in  the  United  States.  Conse- 
quently, the  sales  of  air  service  surplus  were  virtually  limited 
to  commodities  having  commercial  use,  such  as  tires,  photo- 
graphic equipment,  linen  fabric,  fur  used  in  making  aviators' 
clothing,  and  the  like.  Some  of  these  surplus  commodities, 
however,  went  at  good  prices.  One  New  York  concern  bought 
372,500  Chinese  dogskins  for  approximately  $700,000. 
Nearly  5,000,000  board  feet  of  surplus  mahogany,  used  in 
making  propellers,  sold  for  $150  a  thousand  feet.  Great  quan- 
tities of  small  tools  from  the  airplane  factories,  millions  of 
yards  of  cotton  fabric,  and  nearly  4,000,000  pounds  of  long- 
staple  cotton  sold  at  good  prices.  The  Government  realized 
$700,000  from  the  sale  of  20,000,000  feet  of  spruce,  fir,  and 
other  soft  woods  used  in  the  manufacture  of  airplanes.  One 
large  sale  of  airplanes  and  engines  was  recorded.  For  $380,000 
the  Nebraska  Aircraft  Corporation  of  Lincoln,  Nebraska, 
bought  280  Standard  J-i  training  planes  without  engines  and 
280  Hispano-Suiza  engines  to  drive  them. 

To  sell  its  surplus  in  the  United  States  the  Air  Service  set 


SELLING  THE  SURPLUS  281 

up  field  disposal  agencies  at  Boston,  New  York,  Buffalo, 
Chicago,  Detroit,  and  Dayton.  The  property  declared  surplus 
was  valued  at  approximately  $1 15,000,000.  Up  to  the  present 
(July,  1921)  goods  to  the  value  of  $97,000,000  have  been 
sold  from  this  surplus,  and  there  is  an  unsold  residue  valued  at 
$18,000,000.  The  average  recovery  has  been  62  per  cent  of 
the  cost. 

The  disposition  of  the  property  acquired  by  the  United 
States  Spruce  Production  Corporation  in  the  forests  of  the 
Pacific  Northwest  was  delayed  by  the  congressional  investiga- 
tion of  the  affairs  of  that  official  organization.  The  cost  value 
of  all  salvageable  property  was  calculated  at  approximately 
$19,000,000,  of  which  $7,000,000  represented  the  cost  of 
three  railroads  for  hauling  logs.  The  rest  of  the  investment  was 
represented  by  sawmills,  roads,  hotels  and  barracks  for  woods- 
men, hoisting  engines,  drying  kilns,  and  nearly  100,000  other 
items,  among  which  were  22,000,000  feet  of  lumber  produced 
and  on  hand.  The  lumber  of  commercial  grades  was  promptly 
sold,  and  the  Air  Service  arranged  to  take  over  the  3,088,000 
feet  of  airplane  lumber  stock,  for  a  consideration  of  approxi- 
mately $1,000,000.  The  sale  of  the  remaining  property  has 
gone  on  slowly,  and  the  recovery  has  been  low  in  ratio  to  the 
original  cost. 

The  sale  of  surplus  engineering  materials  brought  to  the 
Government  the  unusually  high  average  recoupment  of  87  per 
cent  of  the  cost  of  manufacturing  the  supplies.  The  reason  is 
that  the  largest  and  most  valuable  part  of  the  surplus  consisted 
of  railroad  construction  materials  and  rolling  stock.  The  rail- 
roads of  the  world,  and  particularly  those  of  Europe,  had  been 
neglected  during  the  war,  and  their  rejuvenation  had  become  a 
necessity  even  paramount  to  that  of  reconstructing  general  in- 
dustry. Such  governments  as  those  of  France  and  Poland  were 
glad  of  the  chance  to  secure  American  locomotives,  cars,  and 
cranes  at  the  cost  of  their  manufacture.  The  largest  single  sale 
of  engineer  supplies  was  made  to  the  French  Government, 
which  paid  approximately  $63,000,000  for  485  freight  loco- 
motives and  nearly  20,000  freight  cars.  By  the  spring  of  1920 


282  DEMOBILIZATION 

surplus  engineering  supplies  which  had  cost  $128,000,000  had 
been  sold  for  about  $  1 1 0,000,000.  Large  quantities  of  excavat- 
ing machinery  and  other  contractors'  equipment  were  trans- 
ferred to  the  Bureau  of  Public  Roads. 

Surplus  chemical  warfare  materials,  on  the  other  hand, 
proved  to  have  low  salvage  value.  After  the  armistice  the 
Chemical  Warfare  Service  found  itself  with  some  1,000  car- 
loads of  surplus  materials  on  its  hands.  These  materials  had 
cost  $  1 1 ,000,000.  Of  the  surplus,  obsolete  gas  masks  and  other 
accumulations  valuable  to  no  one  and  therefore  unsalable, 
accounted  for  $2,000,000.  The  rest  consisted  principally  of 
raw  materials  and  machinery.  Certain  of  its  raw  chemicals 
the  Service  was  able  to  dispose  of  to  the  artificial  dye  industry 
at  a  profit.  The  outside  gas-making  plants  attached  to  the 
Edgewood  Arsenal  were  sold  by  auction  to  manufacturers  of 
chemicals. 

Though  the  sales  of  surplus  factories,  machinery,  raw  ma- 
terials, and  scrap  and  junk  were  of  intense  interest  and  concern 
to  industry  and  business  generally,  the  great  masses  of  people 
in  this  country  knew  little  or  nothing  about  them.  The  wage 
earners,  the  millions  drawing  salaries  of  moderate  range,  were 
not  beneficiaries — not  immediate  beneficiaries,  at  any  rate — of 
the  bargains  the  Government  was  offering.  The  trade  journals 
were  filled  with  advertising  and  reading  matter  about  the  sales 
of  the  war  surpluses,  but  the  newspapers  seldom  had  anything 
to  say  about  them.  No  doubt  there  were  hundreds  of  thousands 
of  Americans  who,  immediately  after  the  armistice,  reading 
about  the  excess  stores  which  were  overflowing  the  Govern- 
ment's enormous  warehouses,  expected  to  benefit  personally 
and  at  once  by  the  situation.  It  was  the  opportunity  of  a  life- 
time to  pick  up  a  new  stock  of  kitchen  utensils  for  a  song,  or  a 
lawn  mower,  or  a  new  Dodge  car  at  a  knock-down  price,  or,  at 
least,  new  supplies  of  underclothing  and  other  garments,  or  of 
food  at  figures  which  would  make  the  corner  grocer  squirm. 
But  as  the  weeks  and  months  went  by  and  none  of  these  oppor- 
tunities ever  presented  themselves,  it  became  obvious  to  any 
thinking  person  that  the  Government  itself  must  be  in  league 


SELLING  THE  SURPLUS  283 

with  the  profiteers  and  must  be  holding  out  its  stocks  in  order 
to  let  the  gouging  go  on  without  hindrance. 

Those  who  jumped  to  such  a  conclusion  were  not  aware  of 
the  restrictions  which  their  own  representatives,  the  men  in 
Congress,  had  thrown  about  the  sale  of  government  property. 
Just  as  the  law  forbade  (with  certain  exceptions  and  qualifica- 
tions already  noted  in  this  volume)  the  government  executives 
to  buy  supplies  except  from  the  best  bidder  in  a  competition 
for  the  business,  so  it  forbade  them  to  sell  supplies  except  to 
the  best  bidder.  The  buyers  therefore  had  to  compete  with 
each  other  for  the  surplus  stocks,  either  in  auction  sales  or  by 
sealed  bids  submitted  after  goods  had  been  duly  described  and 
advertised.  And  since  the  Government  had  its  own  sales  ex- 
penses to  consider  and  therefore  could  not  hold  auctions  to 
dispose  of  single  cans  of  tomatoes  or  advertise  for  bids  for 
individual  hams,  the  ultimate  consumer,  unless  he  were  pre- 
pared to  purchase  by  the  carload,  was  as  much  out  of  it  as  if 
the  supplies  were  stored  on  the  moon. 

Not  until  July  29,  1919,  did  Congress  come  to  the  relief  of 
the  ultimate  consumer  by  passing  an  act  authorizing  the  War 
Department  to  sell  food,  clothing,  and  household  supplies  at 
retail.  Within  ten  days  the  Surplus  Property  Division  (of  the 
Division  of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic,  which  had  charge 
of  all  food,  clothing,  and  general  supplies)  inaugurated  a  plan 
of  direct  selling  by  parcel  post.  Price  lists  and  order  blanks 
were  sent  to  the  58,000  post  offices  of  the  United  States,  and 
the  postmasters  were  instructed  to  receive  orders  and  cash  and 
send  consolidated  requisitions  and  payments  to  the  Surplus 
Property  Division.  This  plan  was  not  a  success,  thanks  prin- 
cipally to  the  postmasters'  unfamiliarity  with  such  work;  and 
a  few  weeks  later  it  was  abandoned  altogether  in  favor  of  the 
army  retail  stores.  Through  these  stores  the  masses  of  con- 
sumers at  last  came  into  direct  touch  with  the  surplus  war 
supplies. 

The  store  system  was  established  on  September  25,  1919. 
At  the  stores  a  consumer  might  buy  food  and  other  supplies 
over  the  counter  in  such  quantities  as  he  chose;  or,  if  he  lived 


284  DEMOBILIZATION 

too  far  away  to  visit  the  store,  he  might  order  from  it  goods  to 
be  delivered  by  parcel  post,  postage  prepaid  and  goods  insured 
at  government  expense.  At  first  the  Army  established  twenty- 
five  stores,  and  these  did  so  well  that  additional  stores  and 
branches  were  added,  until  by  the  late  winter  of  1919-1920 
there  were  seventy-seven  places  where  consumers  might  go  and 
buy,  at  reduced  prices,  the  goods  which  their  tax  payments  and 
bond  purchases  had  enabled  the  Government  to  procure.  The 
stores  were  operated  under  the  supervision  of  the  fourteen  zone 
supply  officers. 

In  selling  directly  to  the  consumer,  the  War  Department 
adopted  the  policy  of  pricing  goods  at  four-fifths  of  the  preva- 
lent retail  market  prices.  Since  the  cost  of  living  had  begun  to 
decline  in  late  1919  and  the  early  part  of  1920,  this  policy 
meant  a  loss  to  the  Government,  which  had  paid  war  prices 
for  the  supplies;  but  it  was  not  a  large  loss.  On  the  average,  the 
retail  sales  brought  back  nearly  80  per  cent  of  the  original  cost 
of  the  goods  sold.  The  sales  expenses  came  to  about  10  per  cent 
of  the  money  received. 

The  War  Department  did  everything  in  its  power  to  make 
the  stores  attractive  to  the  public.  It  stocked  them  with  a  wide 
range  of  articles  and  advertised  them  heavily.  A  press  bureau 
was  established  in  Washington,  and  the  newspapers  devoted 
acres  of  space  to  the  publicity.  In  spite  of  the  propaganda, 
however,  the  response  of  the  public  was  not  so  unrestrained 
as  the  outcry  against  the  costs  of  necessaries  might  have  led  one 
to  expect.  (To  be  sure,  the  Government,  naturally,  could  not 
set  up  its  stores  in  the  high-rent  districts — the  districts  most 
convenient  to  the  retail  customers.)  The  army  retail  stores  did 
business  at  the  rate  of  approximately  $5,000,000  a  month — 
not  much  for  110,000,000  potential  customers.  As  the  sales 
went  on  it  became  evident  that,  although  the  protest  against 
high  prices  was  practically  universal,  only  the  thrifty  minority 
was  willing  to  step  across  the  line  of  convenience  and  custom 
in  order  to  secure  lower  ones.  The  rest  preferred  to  grumble  and 
follow  their  lines  of  least  resistance. 

Yet  it  is  probably  true  that  the  retail  stores  benefited  all, 


SELLING  THE  SURPLUS  285 

since  the  continued  sale  of  great  quantities  of  surplus  military 
supplies  at  reduced  prices  doubtless  had  an  effect  in  bringing 
down  commercial  prices.  Although  only  some  350  items  in 
the  Army's  supply  list  were  applicable  to  retail  selling,  this 
range,  after  all,  was  considerable.  In  the  subsistence  list  it  ran 
from  Apples,  Evaporated,  to  Vinegar,  and  in  general  supplies 
from  Arctics,  Cloth  Top,  to  Whips,  Artillery.  The  Surplus 
Property  Division  even  sold  a  few  motorcycles  at  the  stores. 

Far  overshadowing  the  retail  sales  in  quantities  of  goods 
moved  were  the  sales  to  jobbers,  dealers,  and  speculators,  by 
informal  bids  on  advertised  lists  of  supplies.  The  sales  head- 
quarters in  Washington  and  the  zone  offices  became  busy 
markets  for  months  after  the  armistice  as  the  War  Department 
got  rid  of  the  surplus  supplies  procured  by  the  Director  of 
Purchase.  As  stated,  there  were  regular  commodity  days — 
textiles  were  sold  on  Mondays,  raw  materials  on  Tuesdays, 
and  so  on.  At  the  Monday  sales  the  Surplus  Property  Division 
had  taken  in,  by  February  20,  1920,  nearly  $66,000,000  paid 
for  clothing  and  equipage  alone.  These  sales  benefited  the  gen- 
eral public  in  that  they  usually  resulted  in  the  goods  being 
sold  at  retail  by  salvage  companies  or  by  regular  mercantile 
houses  at  reduced  prices. 

The  fluctuations  of  markets  sometimes  made  it  possible  for 
the  Government  to  sell  surplus  to  bidders  at  a  profit.  For 
instance,  a  ton  or  more  of  camphor,  acquired  originally  for  the 
Medical  Department,  brought  a  profit  of  84  per  cent,  due  to 
a  post-armistice  increase  in  the  price  of  camphor.  Medical  sup- 
plies generally,  although  they  were  sold  principally  to  public 
institutions,  brought  a  99-per-cent  recovery  of  their  war 
cost.  General  supplies — including  hardware,  kitchen  utensils, 
brushes  and  brooms,  rope,  paper,  office  furniture,  musical  in- 
struments, and  athletic  goods — sold  at  prices  which  brought 
back  to  the  Government  more  than  72  per  cent  of  their  war 
cost. 

Apparently  useless  supplies — useless  to  civilians,  that  is — 
were  purchased  by  bidders  who  had  found  unique  uses  for 
them.  The  nonbreakable  eyepieces  of  gas  masks  were  found  to 


286  DEMOBILIZATION 

manufacture  well  into  motorists'  goggles.  The  anti-dim  paste 
used  to  keep  the  gas-mask  eyepieces  from  fogging  from  the 
wearers'  breath  had  a  practical  use  upon  the  windshields  of 
automobiles  during  rainstorms.  Trench  fans  were  bought  and 
used  as  aprons  for  cannery  workers. 

Surplus  leather  was  sold  in  auctions  held  in  Philadelphia, 
Chicago,  San  Francisco,  Boston,  and  elsewhere;  and  the  cash 
recoveries  generally  were  large,  ranging  from  71  per  cent  to 
100  per  cent  of  the  war  cost,  and  even,  in  instances,  returning 
a  profit.  Harness  did  not  sell  well,  because  much  of  it  was 
made  of  russet  leather,  which  does  not  attract  the  commercial 
buyer,  or  else  because  the  harnesses  were  of  special  designs  not 
used  by  teamsters. 

The  demands  of  other  departments  of  the  Government  for 
surplus  army  motor  trucks  were  so  great  that  only  a  few  were 
sold  as  surplus,  and  those  few  were  neither  new  nor  in  good 
condition.  Automobile  tires,  however,  were  placed  on  sale  in 
the  retail  stores. 

The  total  sale  of  surplus  materials  acquired  by  the  Division 
of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic  amounted  to  $357,000,000 
between  the  date  of  the  armistice  and  January  31,  1920.  The 
recovery  was  77.57  per  cent  of  the  original  cost. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION 

A  LTHOUGH  as  these  words  are  written  it  is  more  than 
/-%  two  and  a  half  years  since  the  armistice  of  November 
JL  ^11,  1918,  was  signed,  it  is  still  impossible  to  give  a 
clean-cut  and  definitive  statement  of  the  accomplishments  of 
the  industrial  demobilization.  It  may  never  be  possible  to  do 
so.  Although  in  the  main  it  was  possible  to  terminate  the  war 
contracts  with  supplementary  agreements  fixing  the  Govern- 
ment's liability  to  the  penny,  the  consolidation  of  these  agree- 
ments would  not  give  the  full  cost  of  the  termination.  A  few 
claimants  are  stubborn  and  insist  upon  the  ultimate  legal  re- 
dress guaranteed  them  by  the  terms  of  their  contracts.  The 
administration  in  Washington  has  changed,  and  some  few  of 
the  claims  once  settled — as  it  was  believed,  finally — are  being 
reopened.  And  then,  on  the  credit  side  of  the  war  ledger  there 
is  the  same  indefiniteness.  Surpluses  of  war  supplies  are  in- 
determinate— expanding  or  contracting  as  policies  change,  as 
the  military  establishment  finds  need  of  materials  once  de- 
clared surplus,  as  war  reserves  deteriorate.  Thus  it  is  impossible 
to  draw  a  line  and  say  that  all  transactions  on  the  one  side 
should  be  entered  in  the  war  account  and  all  on  the  other  in  the 
account  of  the  permanent  Army. 

But  in  one  important  branch  of  our  war  industry  there  was 
a  complete,  definite  liquidation.  The  red  line  was  drawn  and 
the  balance  struck.  This  was  the  branch  in  which  the  Allies 
and  other  foreign  nations  were  participants,  as  either  buyers 
or  sellers.  The  promptness  with  which  this  transaction  was 
consummated,  and  the  completeness  of  it — down  to  the  last 
dollar  due,  down  to  the  last  pound  of  materials  exchanged — 
mark  it  as  one  of  the  outstanding  accomplishments  in  the  whole 
industrial   record  of  the  war.   Its  benefits   to  the  countries 


288  DEMOBILIZATION 

affected  are  not  to  be  read  entirely  in  the  footings  of  the 
columns  of  debits  and  offsets:  rather,  they  are  political  and 
economic — the  prestige  of  the  United  States  enhanced,  inter- 
national good  will  sustained,  irritation  and  ill  feeling,  which 
might  easily  have  been  aroused  among  the  late  Allies  and  their 
associates  in  the  settlement  of  their  business  arrangements, 
avoided. 

It  is  evident  that  these  war  transactions  fell  into  two  classes : 
one  class  in  which  the  Allies  dealt  (through  the  American 
Government)  with  American  industry  for  the  production  of 
supplies;  the  other  in  which  the  United  States  was  the  cus- 
tomer, and  the  industries  of  the  Allies  (and  to  a  slight  extent 
the  industries  of  certain  neutral  nations)  the  source  of  supply. 
And,  as  the  business  of  terminating  the  arrangements  was  thus 
a  double-barreled  proposition,  the  War  Department  found  it 
convenient  to  attack  it  with  two  agencies :  the  so-called  Cuthell 
Board  (which,  officially  speaking,  was  the  "Special  Represen- 
tative of  the  Secretary  of  War"  and  his  assistants)  and  the 
United  States  Liquidation  Commission. 

Mr.  Chester  W.  Cuthell  was  the  Special  Representative  of 
the  Secretary  of  War.  His  Board  consisted  of  lawyers  and  ac- 
countants whom  he  chose  and  appointed.  The  duties  of  Mr. 
Cuthell  and  his  Board  were  to  terminate  and  settle  up  the  war 
business  of  the  Allies  in  the  United  States  under  those  arrange- 
ments in  which  the  War  Department  had  been  a  participant, 
whether  as  agent,  producer,  or  partner.  The  Board  was  there- 
fore essentially  the  agency  for  liquidating  the  international 
business  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic.  The  United  States  Liqui- 
dation Commission,  on  the  other  hand,  was  the  agency  created 
to  liquidate  America's  war  industry  abroad;  and  this  was  much 
the  greater  of  the  two  tasks.  The  United  States  Liquidation 
Commission  was  charged,  also,  with  an  added  duty:  that  of 
disposing  of  all  American  surplus  military  property  on  foreign 
soil. 

We  must  think  of  both  these  activities  in  international  de- 
mobilization as  going  on  simultaneously,  as  they  did.  The  two 
agencies  were  created  almost  at  the  same  time:  Mr.  Cuthell 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  289 

was  appointed  on  January  22,  1919,  and  the  United  States 
Liquidation  Commission  was  created  on  the  following  Febru- 
ary 1 1 .  Also  it  was  necessary  that  they  both  work  in  the  closest 
contact  and  cooperation  with  each  other,  since  the  arrange- 
ments of  both  would  have  to  come  together  in  the  final  settle- 
ments, the  American  claims  against  the  Allies,  as  substan- 
tiated by  the  Board,  going  to  offset  the  Allied  claims  against 
us,  as  acknowledged  by  the  Liquidation  Commission.  This 
liaison  and  harmony  existed.  The  cooperation,  too,  extended 
to  the  adoption  of  certain  broad  policies  which  were  to  be  fol- 
lowed by  both  in  liquidating  the  business.  One  of  these,  and 
perhaps  the  most  important  one,  was  that,  in  the  negotiations 
that  were  to  follow,  no  nation  should  expect  to  profit  at  the 
expense  of  any  of  the  others.  The  settlements  should  be  made 
on  the  basis  of  actual  cost.  A  second  policy  was  that  interna- 
tional agreements  and  understandings,  even  though  they  had 
never  been  committed  formally  to  writing,  were  to  have  the 
binding  force  of  formal  contracts.  In  other  words,  the  business 
would  be  settled  as  among  partners  and  friends,  no  one  of 
whom  wished  to  take  advantage  of  the  others. 

Upon  both  liquidating  agencies  bore  the  need  for  haste  in 
terminating  the  business.  Armies  were  demobilizing,  personnel 
familiar  with  the  subjects  in  negotiation  melting  away.  If  the 
discussions  were  to  be  long  protracted  they  would  take  on  the 
aspect  of  contentions,  with  evidence  and  affidavits  to  be  se- 
cured, inventories  and  audits  taken,  hearings  conducted,  ex- 
amination and  cross-examination  of  witnesses,  causes  perhaps 
finally  going  into  international  tribunals  or  before  commissions 
of  arbitration.  Nothing  but  ill  feeling  could  result  from  such 
an  outcome.  The  international  business  relations  had  become 
enormously  intricate  during  the  war.  It  was  obviously  an  im- 
practical thing  to  go  into  details,  as  a  creditor  might  attack 
the  schedules  of  a  bankrupt  corporation.  Such  procedure  would 
drag  along  for  years.  It  was  to  the  advantage  of  every  party  to 
the  transactions,  the  parties  being  sovereign  nations  having 
regard  for  their  international  contacts,  to  give  and  take  in 
rough  bargaining,  accepting  estimates  and  lump  sums  rather 


290  DEMOBILIZATION 

than  insisting  upon  items  and  particulars,  and  finally  to  agree 
to  totals  which  at  the  best  would  be  only  approximations.  The 
important  thing  was  to  get  the  business  over  with  justice 
done  to  all. 

That  was  the  spirit  in  which  both  boards  worked. 

Mr.  Cuthell,  upon  his  appointment,  found  in  the  Division 
of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  Traffic  a  consolidated  and  condensed 
record  of  every  claim  held  by  the  War  Department  against  the 
governments  associated  with  us  in  the  war.  This  showed  him 
the  field.  He  discovered,  however,  that  none  of  the  war  mis- 
sions maintained  by  the  Allies  in  the  United  States  was  vested 
with  power  to  adjust  and  settle  these  claims,  many  of  which 
were  disputed.  Therefore,  while  his  hastily  gathered  force  of 
experts  was  preparing  the  claims  for  presentation,  Mr.  Cuth- 
ell himself  (in  April,  1919)  was  sent  to  Europe  to  ask  the 
foreign  governments  concerned  to  create  liquidating  agencies 
competent  to  deal  with  the  United  States  and,  further,  to  re- 
tain in  their  respective  services,  until  the  liquidation  should  be 
effected,  the  officers  familiar  with  the  American  transactions. 

It  should  be  noted  here  that  this  was  a  wide  departure  from 
international  precedent.  Ordinarily,  financial  claims  between 
nations  are  settled  by  the  slow  and  cumbersome  processes  of 
diplomatic  interchange,  or  else  by  arbitration.  To  have  allowed 
the  war  claims  to  go  into  this  channel  would  possibly  have 
meant  the  end  of  the  amity  between  the  Allies  and  the  United 
States.  Our  liquidation  agencies  proposed  direct  dealing 
through  business  plenipotentiaries,  with  restrictions  even  less 
exacting  than  would  be  drawn  by  two  private  corporations. 

In  Paris  Mr.  Cuthell  found  representatives  of  Italy  pre- 
pared to  discuss  the  American  claims  against  Italy.  Soon  after 
the  conferences  started,  however,  President  Wilson  made  pub- 
lic at  the  Peace  Conference  his  attitude  toward  the  Italian 
occupation  of  the  Adriatic  port  of  Fiume;  and  the  Italian 
delegation,  including  those  ready  to  negotiate  a  business  settle- 
ment with  us,  withdrew  from  Paris. 

Mr.  Cuthell  thereupon  went  to  London  to  negotiate  with 
the   British.    The   British    Government    appointed    and   em- 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  291 

powered  a  special  commission,  headed  by  Lord  Inverforth, 
then  the  British  Minister  of  Munitions,  and  including  several 
eminent  representatives  of  the  British  Government,  among 
them  Mr.  W.  T,  Layton,  a  man  of  unusual  ability  and  the  one 
who  took  the  actual  lead  for  the  British  in  the  subsequent  nego- 
tiations, to  deal  with  the  American  claims.  Meanwhile  Mr. 
Cuthell's  principal  assistants  had  arrived  from  the  United 
States,  bringing  with  them  the  now  formulated  statements 
analyzing  the  British  war  business  in  America  and  setting 
forth  what  our  negotiators  regarded  as  the  proper  charges  for 
the  British  to  pay  in  settlement.  These  assistants  were  Mr. 
Ralph  W.  Gwinn,  who  was  to  present  the  Liberty  engine  case ; 
Mr.  Miller  D.  Steever,  in  charge  of  the  airplane  lumber  claim; 
and  Mr.  F.  C.  Weems,  who  had  prepared  the  smokeless  powder 
and  cotton  linters  cases.  The  conferences  began  immediately, 
and  such  was  the  progress  made  that  within  ten  days  a  com- 
plete agreement  was  reached,  and  the  British  war  business  in 
the  United  States  was  definitely  terminated.  The  so-called 
Cuthell-Inverforth  Agreement,  which  embodied  the  terms  of 
settlement,  was  dated  May  10,  1919. 

The  agreement,  reached  so  speedily  and  with  such  complete 
mutual  accord,  terminated  a  vast  business  within  the  United 
States.  From  the  United  States  as  dealer.  Great  Britain  had 
procured  smokeless  powder,  picric  acid,  airplane  lumber,  and 
Liberty  engines.  As  a  partner  of  the  United  States,  Great 
Britain  participated  in  the  pool  of  cotton  linters  which  cor- 
nered the  entire  American  supply  for  the  benefit  of  the  powder 
mills.  England  was  also  a  partner  with  us  in  the  project  to 
build  a  chain  of  chemical  factories  in  America  to  produce 
acetone,  used  in  making  dope  for  airplane  wings.  These  fac- 
tories never  came  into  production,  and  the  project  was  closed 
out  with  a  loss  of  over  $6,000,000,  half  of  which  loss  the 
British  were  bound  to  share.  We  participated  with  England  in 
the  purchase  of  Australasian  wool.  The  terms  under  which  the 
wool  contract  was  closed  out  were  noted  in  a  previous  chapter 
of  this  volume. 

The  celerity  with  which  these  complicated  war  transactions 


292  DEMOBILIZATION 

were  terminated  was  a  distinct  triumph  in  international  nego- 
tiation. The  British,  when  they  entered  the  conferences,  prob- 
ably had  no  idea  that  they  were  to  be  rushed  through  to  any 
such  speedy  conclusion.  The  conferences,  in  fact,  began  as  if 
they  were  to  drag  along  for  an  extended  time.  On  the  first  day 
Mr.  Gwinn  gave  a  careful  and  clear  exposition  of  the  Liberty 
engine  case,  setting  forth  in  detail  just  what  we  had  done  and 
to  what  extent  the  British  ought  to  participate  in  the  costs. 
Although,  whenever  any  of  his  figures  were  challenged,  the 
American  delegation  proceeded  then  and  there  to  make  adjust- 
ments apparently  to  the  satisfaction  of  the  British  commis- 
sioners, yet  when  Mr.  Gwinn  had  concluded,  the  Americans 
were  unable  to  gain  from  the  British  any  expression  of  opinion 
as  to  whether  the  total  would  be  accepted,  at  least  tentatively, 
as  the  British  obligation.  It  was  evident  that  the  British  ex- 
pected to  prepare  and,  later  on,  press  an  argument  against  the 
American  statement.  If  this  procedure  were  to  be  followed 
throughout  the  negotiations,  it  would  be  many  weeks  before 
the  conferees  could  reach  any  final  agreement. 

This  outcome  of  the  first  day's  negotiation  was  a  disappoint- 
ment to  the  Americans,  but  they  determined  to  try  again  next 
day.  The  next  morning  Mr.  Steever  took  up  the  airplane 
lumber  case,  and  talked  for  nearly  four  hours.  He  went  into  a 
description  of  the  picturesque  phases  of  the  northwestern 
lumbering  enterprise — the  felling  of  the  spruce  trees,  the  steel 
cables  on  which  the  great  trunks  slid  down  the  mountain  sides, 
the  railroads  built  into  hitherto  inaccessible  wildernesses.  But 
punctuating  his  rhetoric  were  the  hard  figures  of  costs,  expendi- 
tures, losses,  deliveries,  and  values.  The  British  had  shared  in 
this  whole  enterprise  in  the  Pacific  Northwest,  the  develop- 
ment of  which  had  never  reached  the  stage  of  turning  out  the 
airplane  lumber  at  low  prices.  As  Mr.  Steever  talked  he  invited 
interruption  and  objection,  and  the  British  delegates  availed 
themselves  of  the  invitation.  The  various  objections  were  re- 
solved as  the  case  was  unfolded.  At  the  conclusion  Mr.  Cuthell 
asked  for  any  further  objections  to  the  statement.  But  the 
British  had  exhausted  their  challenges  during  the  presentation 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  293 

of  the  claim.  The  only  objection  raised  was  to  British  partici- 
pation in  the  cost  of  certain  dry  kilns  in  which  the  export 
airplane  lumber  was  not  treated.  This  item  was  promptly  sub- 
tracted from  the  claim's  total,  and  then  Mr.  Cuthell  briefly 
urged  that  the  column's  footing  be  accepted  tentatively  as  the 
British  obligation.  If  not  to  the  surprise  of  the  Americans,  cer- 
tainly to  their  extreme  gratification,  the  British  commission 
agreed. 

That  was  the  real  victory,  for  it  set  the  precedent  for  the 
entire  settlement.  Each  day  the  Americans  presented  a  new 
case;  and  each  evening  when  the  American  representatives 
left  the  Hotel  Metropole  in  London,  where  the  conferences 
were  held,  a  tentative  agreement  in  that  case  had  been  reached. 
Finally  all  the  claims  were  settled  tentatively,  except  the 
Liberty  engine  claim.  Once  more  the  Americans  pressed  to  have 
the  original  statement  accepted,  and  it  was.  It  was  understood, 
however,  that  all  figures  were  to  be  subject  to  verification  by 
a  British  audit  of  the  books  of  the  War  Department  in  Wash- 
ington. 

On  the  tenth  day  the  Americans  brought  to  the  Metropole 
a  tentative  written  agreement,  embodying  all  the  sub-settle- 
ments agreed  upon,  Mr.  Cuthell  then  pointed  out  the  consider- 
able cost  of  a  British  audit  of  our  books,  the  possibilities  of 
friction  arising  over  the  presence  of  British  auditors  in  our  War 
Department  over  an  extended  period,  and  the  likelihood,  since 
all  the  American  estimates  were  conservative,  that  the  audit 
would  not  in  any  event  greatly  change  the  amount  of  the 
British  obligation  and  might  even  increase  it;  and  he  suggested 
that  it  would  be  good  policy  for  the  British  to  accept  the  tenta- 
tive figure  as  final  and  let  it  go  at  that.  Lord  Inverforth 
promptly  agreed.  That  was  cricket,  as  the  English  say. 

The  agreement  fixed  the  cash  liability  of  the  British  Gov- 
ernment for  its  unpaid  American  war  bills  and  its  obligations 
arising  from  the  termination  of  its  American  contracts  and 
engagements  at  $35,464,823.10.  Of  this  the  Liberty  engine 
item  was  the  largest  item — approximately  $14,000,000.  The 
British  paid  over  $13,000,000  to  satisfy  all  claims  of  the 


294  DEMOBILIZATION 

United  States  arising  from  the  British  purchases  of  airplane 
spruce,  fir,  and  cedar.  Its  powder  contracts  accounted  for 
nearly  $4,700,000  of  the  settlement  sum,  wood  distillates 
(principally  acetone)  for  about  $2,900,000,  and  its  2-per-cent 
share  in  the  linters  pool  for  the  rest. 

Practically  all  the  settlements  made  by  the  Cuthell  Board 
were  carried  as  offsets  to  the  American  liabilities  under  the 
general  foreign  liquidation  accomplished  by  the  United  States 
Liquidation  Commission;  but  the  British  preferred  to  make 
their  settlements  separate  transactions.  Accordingly,  on  August 
2,  1919,  a  representative  of  the  British  Treasury  delivered  to 
the  War  Department  a  check  in  payment  of  the  British  obliga- 
tion under  the  terms  of  the  Cuthell-Inverforth  Agreement. 
This,  however,  was  not  a  complete  termination  for  Great 
Britain.  That  Government  admitted  full  liability  under 
numerous  other,  but  small,  claims  which  the  War  Department 
had  not  yet  had  time  to  prepare  in  detail.  As  invoices  were 
subsequently  presented  to  the  British  Government,  these  claims 
were  promptly  paid.  The  minor  cases  came  to  approximately 
$7,000,000. 

Progress  almost  equally  swift  was  made  by  the  Cuthell 
Board  in  securing  a  settlement  of  the  American  claims  against 
France.  At  first  there  was  no  official  French  agency  empowered 
to  make  such  a  settlement.  Mr.  Cuthell  and  his  assistants  pro- 
ceeded immediately  to  Paris  after  making  the  British  agree- 
ment and  importuned  the  French  Government  to  designate  a 
representative  competent  to  conclude  a  settlement.  There  they 
were  joined  by  Messrs.  Charles  B.  Shelton,  William  Fisher, 
John  H.  Ray,  Jr.,  and  Harry  A.  Fisher,  who  brought  with 
them  from  Washington  the  formulated  statements  of  various 
American  claims  against  the  French.  After  several  days'  delay 
Premier  Clemenceau  appointed  the  French  Liquidation  Com- 
mission, headed  by  M.  Edouard  de  Billy,  who  had  been  with 
the  French  High  Commission  in  Washington  during  the  war 
and  was  therefore  familiar  with  the  French  contracts  in  the 
United  States.  To  France  the  War  Department  had  sold 
picric  acid,  cotton  linters,  smokeless  powder,  airplane  lumber, 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  295 

and  Liberty  engines.  The  French  liability  in  these  cases  was 
finally  fixed  at  $95,968,561.87,  and  a  formal  agreement  ad- 
mitting the  liability  was  signed  on  May  29,  1919.  There  were 
other  considerable  claims  against  France,  the  statements  of 
which  had  not  yet  been  prepared.  Later  (September  9,  1919) 
Mr.  Cuthell  came  to  an  agreement  with  M.  Casenave,  minister 
plenipotentiary  of  France  in  the  United  States,  whereby  the 
French  admitted  an  additional  liability  of  $64,910,352.92.  Of 
this  sum,  $38,000,000  represented  ocean  freight  charges  upon 
war  supplies  bought  by  France  in  the  United  States  and  carried 
to  France  in  American  army  cargo  transports. 

Two  additional  settlements  with  France,  one  terminating 
the  French  contract  with  J.  G.  White  &  Company  for  raw 
materials  for  airplane  manufacture  and  the  other  terminating 
the  French  contract  with  the  General  Vehicle  Company  for  the 
production  of  Gnome  rotary  airplane  engines,  increased  the 
French  liability  by  $2,117,785.34.  These  settlements  were 
made  in  France  by  Mr.  Monte  Appel,  chief  assistant  to  Mr. 
Cuthell.  The  total  liability  arising  from  the  American  war 
business  of  France  was  therefore  $162,996,700.13.  This  sum 
went  into  the  general  settlement  agreement  made  with  the 
French  by  the  United  States  Liquidation  Commission. 

Soon  after  the  French  settlement  was  a  fact,  the  Italian 
Government  appointed  a  commission  to  treat  with  the  Cuthell 
Board.  The  Italian  agreement,  dated  August  13,  1919,  ad- 
mitted an  obligation  on  the  part  of  Italy  in  the  sum  of  $5,200,- 
000,  representing  Italian  war  purchases  of  picric  acid,  smoke- 
less powder,  airplane  lumber,  linters,  and  trinitrotoluol,  this 
agreement  not  including  an  admitted  obligation  of  approxi- 
mately $395,000  for  Liberty  engines,  clothing,  and  other  small 
items  not  yet  invoiced.  Against  this  obligation  Italy  presented 
a  claim  for  $4,053,073  for  the  overseas  transportation  of 
American  troops  on  Italian  ships.  The  Italian  Government 
paid  the  difference,  namely,  $1,146,927  to  the  War  Depart- 
ment on  September  26,  1919,  and  also  paid  the  minor  claims 
as  they  were  presented. 

Minor  claims  against  the  governments  of  Belgium,  Brazil, 


296  DEMOBILIZATION 

Canada,  Cuba,  and  Czecho-Slovakia,  to  the  total  of  $4,709,- 
330.89,  were  presented  by  the  Cuthell  Board  and  paid  by  the 
governments  concerned. 

While  the  Cuthell  Board  was  engaged  in  rendering  the  bills 
to  the  Allies  for  supplies  purchased  by  them  in  America  and 
collecting  the  money  on  those  bills, — and  here  let  it  be  said  that 
the  collections  were  greater  in  aggregate  amount  than  the  total 
sum  involved  in  all  the  claims  for  or  against  the  United  States 
prosecuted  or  resisted  by  the  nation's  official  diplomacy  from 
the  beginning  of  our  national  existence  up  to  the  outbreak  of 
the  war  in  Europe;  international  transactions  which  included 
the  Louisiana  Purchase,  the  purchase  of  Alaska,  and  the  pur- 
chase of  the  Canal  Zone, — all  the  while  that  Mr.  Cuthell  and 
his  associates  were  collecting  money  for  Uncle  Sam,  the  United 
States  Liquidation  Commission  was  busy  adjusting  the  fit  of 
the  shoe  on  the  old  gentleman's  other  foot.  In  other  words,  the 
Commission  was  paying  the  war  bills  owed  by  the  United 
States  to  the  Allies.  This  was  a  business  equally  great  and  even 
more  important. 

There  was  some  question  whether  the  President,  with  all  his 
war  powers,  could  legally  empower  boards  and  commissions  to 
conclude  international  settlements  involving  the  passing  of 
money,  since  such  power  resided  only  in  the  State  Department, 
the  acts  of  which  had  to  be  ratified  by  Congress  before  they 
were  binding  upon  the  United  States.  The  Cuthell  Board  and 
the  United  States  Liquidation  Commission  were  actually 
created  in  January  and  February,  1919;  but  to  remove  any 
doubt  as  to  the  binding  force  of  their  settlements.  Congress, 
on  March  2,  1919,  passed  an  act  empowering  the  Secretary  of 
War  to  settle,  through  any  agency  he  might  set  up,  all  inter- 
national war  claims  in  which  the  War  Department  was 
involved. 

The  Secretary  of  War  appointed  Mr.  Edwin  B.  Parker 
chairman  of  the  United  States  Liquidation  Commission.  As 
members  he  appointed  Brigadier  General  Charles  G.  Dawes, 
Mr.  Homer  H.  Johnson,  and  Hon.  Henry  F.  Hollis.  During 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  297 

the  active  part  of  the  war  Judge  Parker  had  held  the  im- 
portant post  of  priorities  commissioner  of  the  War  Industries 
Board.  General  Dawes,  in  private  life  a  Chicago  banker,  had 
been  General  Purchasing  Agent  of  the  A.  E.  F.  In  1920  he 
sprang  into  national  prominence  when,  as  a  witness  before  a 
congressional  investigating  committee,  in  vigorous  and  uncon- 
ventional style  he  defended  the  material  transactions  of  the 
A.  E.  F.  and  denounced  those  critics  who,  in  searching  for 
waste  and  lavish  expenditure,  evidently  overlooked  the  fact 
that  the  prime  purpose  of  the  A.  E.  F.  was  to  defeat  a  danger- 
ous enemy  on  the  field  of  battle.  His  striking  utterances  on 
that  occasion  did  more  than  reams  of  printed  propaganda  to 
reconcile  the  American  public  to  the  inevitable  wastes  of  the 
war.  President  Harding  soon  afterwards  appointed  "Hell  and 
Maria"  Dawes,  as  he  had  come  to  be  known,  federal  budget 
commissioner,  thus  placing  him  in  charge  of  the  most  important 
attempt  at  economy  in  national  expenditures  which  the  United 
States  had  ever  made.  Mr.  Johnson  was  an  able  and  well- 
known  lawyer  of  Cleveland.  Mr.  Hollis  was  a  former  United 
States  senator  from  New  Hampshire. 

When  the  Liquidation  Commission  reached  France  and 
organized  for  work  about  March  1,  1919,  it  found  the  ground 
well  prepared  for  it.  Mr.  Edward  R.  Stettinius,  the  well- 
known  New  York  financier,  had  been  sent  to  France  in  July, 

1918,  as  a  special  representative  of  the  Secretary  of  War  to 
act  as  a  sort  of  surveyor-general  over  the  war  industry  result- 
ing from  the  foreign  orders  placed  by  the  American  Expedi- 
tionary Forces.  Mr.  Stettinius  found  that  a  considerable  part 
of  the  munitions  being  procured  abroad  was  being  produced 
and  delivered  under  informal  and  more  or  less  vague  agree- 
ments and  understandings.  Before  the  armistice  Mr.  Stettinius 
had  done  his  best  to  reduce  some  of  the  more  important  of  these 
understandings  to  the  form  of  written,  definite  contracts. 
Promptly  after  the  armistice  he  took  steps  to  cancel  all  further 
production  for  the  Americans  and  then  began  the  negotiations 
leading  to  the  settlements.  Mr.  Stettinius  resigned  in  January, 

1919,  and  the  United  States  Liquidation  Commission  inherited 


298  DEMOBILIZATION 

these  various  negotiations  in  the  stages  at  which  Mr.  Stettinius 

left  them. 

Although,  as  we  have  said,  the  characteristic  note  of  our 
industrial  demobilization  abroad  was  outright  cancellation  of 
contracts  and  the  payment  of  indemnities,  the  policy  was  not 
maintained  consistently.  There  were  several  important  excep- 
tions, and  one  of  these  was  the  method  adopted  in  terminating 
the  British  manufacture  of  artillery  and  shell  for  the  A.  E.  F. 
The  numerous  orders,  contracts,  and  agreements  placed  and 
made  by  the  A.  E.  F.  for  the  delivery  of  British  artillery  and 
ammunition  were  consolidated,  on  October  19,  1918,  by  Mr. 
Stettinius  in  conference  with  Mr.  Winston  Churchill,  then  the 
British  Minister  of  Munitions,  into  a  single  formal  agreement. 
In  terminating  this  contract  after  the  armistice  Mr.  Stettinius 
assumed  that  it  would  be  better  to  accept  completed  guns  and 
ammunition,  even  though  these  might  be  surplus  above  the 
future  requirements  of  the  Army,  than  to  pay  heavy  cancella- 
tion indemnities  and  receive  nothing  in  return.  Artillery  does 
not  deteriorate  rapidly,  either  materially  or  in  design.  The 
negotiations  opened  by  Mr.  Stettinius  with  the  British  Govern- 
ment looking  to  this  end  were  picked  up  by  the  Liquidation 
Commission,  which,  in  March,  1919,  reached  an  agreement 
with  the  British  that,  in  lieu  of  paying  any  cancellation  dam- 
ages, the  United  States  would  accept  a  limited  quantity  of 
materiel  completed  after  the  armistice  under  the  American 
contract. 

America  accordingly  accepted  the  post-armistice  delivery  of 
498  British-made  guns,  ranging  in  model  from  60-pounders  to 
8-inch  howitzers,  and  420,000  rounds  of  ammunition  for  them. 
For  this  materiel  the  American  Government  paid  £6,637,598. 

A  most  interesting  negotiation  conducted  by  the  Liquidation 
Commission  for  the  United  States  was  that  which  wound  up 
the  tripartite  international  project  for  the  construction  of 
36-ton  tanks,  better  known  as  the  Anglo-American  Mark  VIII 
tanks.  France  was  originally  a  party  to  this  transaction  only 
to  the  extent  of  agreeing  to  provide  a  site  for  the  assembling 
plant  in  France.  England  and  the  United  States  were  equal 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  299 

partners  in  the  enterprise,  England  supplying  hulls  and  guns 
and  America  the  power  and  traction.  The  French,  however, 
were  to  be  permitted  to  buy  tanks  at  the  partnership  price ;  but 
the  French  at  first  did  not  ask  for  any,  asserting  that  their  own 
light  tank  production  was  sufficient  for  them. 

The  plant  was  built  at  Chateauroux,  Neuvy-Failloux. 
About  the  time  the  project  was  getting  well  under  way,  heavier 
tanks  began  to  demonstrate  their  effectiveness  in  the  field; 
and  then  France  insisted  that,  because  her  armies  held  the  most 
front-line  mileage,  the  most  of  the  Anglo-American  tanks  to 
be  built  at  the  Chateauroux  plant  should  be  allotted  to  her. 
Reluctantly  the  British  agreed  that  the  first  1,200  tanks  should 
be  divided  equally  between  France  and  the  United  States  and 
that  France  should  receive  all  of  the  next  300. 

Then  the  war  ended.  About  24,000,000  francs  had  been 
invested  at  Chateauroux.  The  British  had  spent  £3,000,000  in 
the  manufacture  of  components  and  the  Americans  a  like  sum, 
expressed  in  dollars.  France  had  not  put  in  a  centime;  yet  she 
had  expected  to  receive  nine-sixteenths  of  the  first  year's 
output.  The  question  was,  what  share  of  the  heavy  loss  should 
France  stand?  The  French  arrangement  with  the  Tank  Com- 
mission was  tantamount  to  a  contract,  with  the  British-Ameri- 
can partnership  standing  in  the  light  of  contractor.  It  was 
evident,  then,  that  the  French  were  morally  bound  to  pay  can- 
cellation charges — to  stand  part  of  the  loss,  in  other  words. 
The  British  and  American  negotiators  at  London  thought  it 
would  be  about  right  if  France  would  pay  back  the  24,000,000 
francs  expended  by  the  British  and  Americans  at  Chateauroux, 
and  the  British  and  Americans  would  throw  in  the  tank  plant 
itself  as  an  inducement. 

Then  the  question  arose,  how  would  this  24,000,000  francs 
be  divided  *?  Both  England  and  America  had  lost  heavily  in 
the  big-tank  enterprise — each  had,  in  fact,  agreed  to  let  these 
losses  balance  each  other;  neither  was  to  bill  the  other  for 
anything  in  the  settlement — and  here  seemed  to  be  the  chance 
to  get  some  of  the  money  back.  Naturally,  the  Americans 
assumed  that  the  French  reimbursement  would  be  divided 


300  DEMOBILIZATION 

equally,  since  both  America  and  England  had  contributed 
equally  to  the  cost  of  the  Chateauroux  plant.  But  no,  the 
British  contended;  since  they  had  surrendered  their  share  of 
the  first  year's  production  of  tanks,  the  lion's  share  of  the  reim- 
bursement should  go  to  them.  There  was  logic  in  this,  but, 
without  deciding  the  point,  both  sides  repaired  to  Paris  to 
present  their  joint  tank  claim  to  the  French;  and  then  it  ap- 
peared that  the  British  and  Americans  had  been  dividing  some 
French  chickens  before  they  were  hatched.  Through  M.  Louis 
Loucheur,  the  Minister  of  Munitions,  the  French  Government 
metaphorically  lifted  its  eyebrows  in  surprise  that  its  associates 
could  present  such  a  claim.  To  be  sure,  the  French  expected  to 
take  the  Anglo-American  heavy  tanks,  but  so  did  the  Americans 
and  British  expect  to  receive  light  tanks  from  the  French  in- 
dustry. These  were  merely  understandings,  not  formal  con- 
tracts; and  the  French,  to  do  their  share,  had  made  large 
expenditures  in  developing  the  light-tank  manufacture  for  the 
benefit  of  all.  Needless  to  say,  the  French  Government  had  lost 
heavily  in  terminating  its  tank  industry.  These  national  losses 
should  set  off  each  other.  ... 

The  British  and  American  representatives  retired  to  ponder 
this  rejoinder.  It  seemed  to  have  merit;  yet  the  fact  remained 
that  somehow  or  other  France  was  evidently  going  to  emerge 
from  the  tank  discussion  with  the  Chateauroux  plant  in  her 
possession.  The  delegates  returned  and  argued  with  such  force 
that  the  French  Government  agreed  to  pay  20,000,000  francs 
in  settlement,  taking  over  the  Chateauroux  plant.*  Since  the 
salvage  value  of  this  plant  was  estimated  at  5,000,000  francs, 
the  sum  of  15,000,000  francs  was  considered  as  the  indemnity 
paid  by  France.  England  then  asked  for  five-sixths  of  the  total 
payment,  but  the  American  argument  scaled  this  down  to  70 
per  cent.  America  thus  received  6,000,000  francs  out  of  the 
settlement. 

The  bargaining  Yankees,  however,  were  yet  to  have  the  final 
word  in  the  tank  deal.  With  the  settlement  complete,  sealed 

*  The  French  Government  later  converted  the  plant  into  a  railroad  car 
repair  shop. 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  301 

and  delivered,  the  British  had  on  their  hands  105  sets  of  tank 
parts  with  only  junk  value,  although  it  had  cost  the  British 
£5,000  a  set  to  manufacture  them.  The  Americans  offered 
£1,000  a  set  for  these  parts,  and  the  British  snapped  at  the 
offer.  This  fine  bargain  enabled  us  later,  at  low  cost,  to 
assemble  these  parts  with  the  American-built  components  and 
thus  place  in  the  war  reserves  100  of  the  largest  and  most 
formidable  tanks  ever  built. 

Another,  a  minor,  tank  transaction  should  be  noted.  The 
British  Army  had  supplied,  during  the  action,  sixty-four  tanks 
of  various  sorts  to  the  301st  Tank  Battalion  of  the  A.  E.  F. 
Fifty  of  these,  some  of  them  more  or  less  damaged,  had  been 
returned  to  the  British  after  the  armistice,  and  the  remaining 
fourteen  were  shipped  to  the  United  States.  For  the  purchase 
of  the  fourteen  and  for  the  war  use  of  the  other  fifty,  the 
Liquidation  Commission  agreed  to  pay  the  British  Govern- 
ment the  sum  of  £189,233  2s  1  id. 

Outside  the  claims  for  payment  for  materials  actually  de- 
livered, the  British  pressed  upon  the  Liquidation  Commission 
collateral  claims  of  several  sorts.  One  of  these  was  for  interest 
upon  money  invested  by  the  British  in  stocks  of  goods  destined 
for  American  consumption.  Our  people  protested  successfully 
against  paying  interest  upon  such  investments,  but  admitted 
the  point  that  we  should  pay  interest  after  the  goods  had  been 
delivered  and  we  had  been  billed,  allowing  a  reasonable  inter- 
est-free period  for  vouchering  and  checking.  Investigation 
showed  that  both  armies  had  been  dilatory  in  paying  their  bills 
to  each  other,  and  that  the  average  time  of  delaying  payment 
had  been  five  months  and  a  quarter.  The  British  bills  against 
America  exceeded  the  American  bills  against  England  by  some 
£51,000,000.  One  month  and  a  half  was  allowed  as  a  reason- 
able interest-free  period  after  billing.  Accordingly  the  com- 
mission agreed  to  pay  5-per-cent  interest  on  the  British  billing 
excess,  a  sum  which  amounted  to  £797,854  lis  2d,  and  this 
America  paid.* 

*  This  sum  was  much  more  than  offset  in  our  favor  by  the  decline  in  sterling 
exchange  during  the  time  bills  were  unpaid. 


302  DEMOBILIZATION 

It  was  impossible  for  the  Liquidation  Commission  to  make 
a  lump  settlement  of  all  the  minor  bills,  accounts,  and  claims 
of  Great  Britain  against  America,  because  of  the  difficulties 
in  securing  full  statements  of  the  indebtedness.  It  was 
roughly  estimated,  however,  that  these  claims  would  aggregate 
£10,000,000. 

One  obscure  and  involved  problem  for  the  Commission  to 
solve  related  to  the  so-called  British  "hidden  losses"  on  steel 
products  sold  to  the  United  States  during  the  war.  The  British 
treatment  and  control  of  its  war  prices  differed  radically  in 
method  from  ours.  The  War  Industries  Board,  it  will  be 
remembered,  fixed  prices  high  enough  to  stimulate  production 
and  then  held  the  industries  to  those  prices,  no  matter  to  whom 
they  sold.  The  British  plan  was  an  opposite  one.  With  steel, 
for  instance,  the  British  Government  simply  monopolized  the 
raw  materials  and  sold  them  to  the  producers  at  prices  that 
represented  a  loss  to  the  Government.  In  effect,  it  was  a  sub- 
sidy. To  the  British  public  it  made  no  difference  whether  it 
paid  this  subsidy  or  an  equal  amount  in  the  increased  cost  of 
artillery,  ammunition,  and  other  munitions  made  of  steel.  But 
when  it  came  to  a  settlement  between  England  and  the  United 
States,  the  British  Government  insisted  that  the  United  States 
was  not  fairly  entitled  to  the  "manufacturers'  issues"  price  for 
the  raw  steel  that  went  into  the  British-made  munitions  sup- 
plied to  America.  The  British,  therefore,  after  the  main 
settlements,  presented  a  supplementary  claim  to  compensate 
for  the  hidden  loss,  and  this  claim  amounted  approximately 
to  £3,770,000. 

In  principle,  the  Commission  was  willing  to  admit  the  force 
of  the  British  contention.  It  asked  the  British,  however,  to  pre- 
pare a  more  definite  statement,  showing  ( 1 )  the  average  Brit- 
ish governmental  loss  on  all  steel  supplied  to  manufacturers 
for  the  year  preceding  the  armistice,  (2)  the  amount  of  such 
steel  that  went  into  products  sold  to  America,  and,  finally,  (3) 
the  hidden  loss  on  all  steel  furnished  to  America  as  thus  esti- 
mated. When  the  revised  statement  was  presented,  it  was 
found  to  contain  items  of  hidden  loss  which  America  could  not 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  303 

possibly  allow.  The  British  war  subsidies  went  all  through 
their  war  industry.  For  instance,  in  order  to  stimulate  produc- 
tion, the  British  Government  had  paid  subsidies  to  the  makers 
of  silica  brick,  used  in  building  steel  furnaces.  The  British 
asked  us  to  stand  a  part  of  this  subsidy,  inasmuch  as  some  of 
the  shell  supplied  to  us  had  been  produced  from  furnaces  built 
of  subsidized  brick.  The  Commission  retorted  by  asking  why 
Great  Britain  did  not  also  ask  us  to  share  the  subsidy  on  the 
bread  the  British  steel  workers  had  eaten  while  they  were  work- 
ing on  the  American  artillery  and  shell  orders.  In  other  words, 
we  were  willing  to  pay  hidden  losses  so  long  as  they  were  not 
too  remotely  connected  with  the  American  contracts.  The  Com- 
mission also  raised  the  shrewd  question,  why,  since  the  British 
were  asking  us  to  pay  for  hidden  losses,  they  did  not  admit  us 
to  the  benefits  of  their  "hidden  profits" — viz.,  the  profit  taxes 
collected  from  the  British  steel  manufacturers. 

In  the  autumn  of  1920  General  G.  W.  Burr,  the  Director 
of  Purchase,  Storage,  and  TrafRc  after  the  armistice  and  a 
member  of  the  War  Department  Claims  Board,  went  to  Eng- 
land to  close  up  all  the  outstanding  claims  existing  between  the 
United  States  and  Great  Britain  as  a  result  of  the  war.  The 
outcome  of  his  negotiations  was  the  Burr-Niemeyer  Agreement, 
which  tied  up  all  loose  ends  and  brought  about  a  final  termina- 
tion of  the  war  business  between  the  two  nations.  All  pending 
claims  were  brought  into  one  lump-sum  settlement,  under  the 
terms  of  which  the  United  States  paid  to  Great  Britain  the 
sum  of  £2,946,511  2s  8d.  This  sum  settled  all  the  miscella- 
neous and  minor  claims  noted  above;  settled,  too,  the  debt 
owed  by  the  United  States  to  the  British  for  the  maintenance 
of  our  Siberian  Expedition;  and  settled  all  other  claims,  in- 
cluding the  hidden-loss  claim  and  a  British  claim  for  reim- 
bursement for  various  "overhead"  inspection  and  storage 
charges.  The  settlement  figure  was  much  under  what  the 
British  had  originally  claimed.  In  this  settlement  the  hidden- 
loss  and  "overhead"  claims  were  paired  in  a  single  item  which 
accounted  for  approximately  £1,500,000  of  the  total  paid  by 


304  DEMOBILIZATION 

the  United  States.  The  Burr-Niemeyer  Agreement  was  dated 
November  23,  1920. 

One  general  claim  set  up  by  the  British  Government  against 
the  United  States  the  Liquidation  Commission  rejected.  After 
we  had  paid  to  Great  Britain  the  bill  rendered  for  the  trans- 
portation of  our  troops  and  supplies  in  England,  the  British 
Government  rendered  a  supplementary  bill  for  the  same  serv- 
ices. During  the  war  Great  Britain  gave  guaranties  of  income 
to  the  British  railways,  and  in  settling  with  the  railroads  the 
British  Government  granted  to  them  an  increase  in  military 
passenger  rates,  an  increase  which  was  retroactive  to  April  1, 
1919.  The  British  asked  us  to  pay  our  share  of  the  retroactive 
increase.  This  was  refused  on  the  ground  that  by  the  same 
token  we  could  hold  the  British  to  their  share  of  the  loss  sus- 
tained by  the  American  Government  in  its  operation  of  the 
American  railroads  by  the  United  States  Railroad  Administra- 
tion, since  our  roads  had  hauled  great  quantities  of  British 
supplies.  To  open  up  closed  settlements  because  of  retroactive 
agreements  would  open  up  a  Pandora's  box  of  troubles  for 
both  nations. 

Thus  the  international  bargaining  went  on,  back  and  forth, 
give  and  take,  broad  principles  of  settlement  prevailing  rather 
than  the  minute  and  individual  merits  of  particular  items,  both 
sides  accepting  estimates  and  unaudited  totals  and  each  relying 
upon  the  good  faith  of  the  other.  Thus  this  tremendously  in- 
volved and  intricate  business  was  closed  up  with  dispatch  and 
amiability.  As  a  rule  the  A.  E.  F.  in  its  purchases  had  dealt 
with  governments,  with  which  such  liquidation  methods  could 
be  adopted;  but  there  were  a  few  relatively  small  contracts 
made  directly  with  private  individuals  in  England,  France, 
Italy,  Portugal,  Spain,  and  Switzerland.  These  contracts  were 
canceled  outright  in  the  full  knowledge  that  we  should  have 
to  pay  indemnities.  In  the  settlement  of  such  contracts  the 
United  States  Liquidation  Commission  acted  for  the  A.  E.  F. 
much  as  the  War  Department  Claims  Board  did  for  the  pro- 
ducing bureaus  at  home — as  a  supervisory  body,  approving  the 
settlements  made  by  the  various  services  of  the  A.  E.  F.  and 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  305 

paying  off  the  contractors.  In  all,  indemnities  were  paid  for 
the  cancellation  of  some  450  contracts  in  Europe.  In  making 
these  settlements,  the  United  States  benefited  greatly  by  the 
depreciated  rates  of  exchange  against  the  currencies  of  several 
of  these  nations,  since  all  indemnities  were  paid  by  the  United 
States  in  the  currency  of  the  countries  in  which  the  claims 
arose.  Expressed  in  dollars  at  par,  it  cost  the  United  States 
$3,568,653.23  to  cancel  the  miscellaneous  European  contracts, 
but  the  reduced  exchange  rates  effected  a  considerable  saving 
under  that  figure. 

It  is  much  easier  to  detect  the  failings  and  peculiarities  of 
aliens  than  it  is  to  recognize  our  own  shortcomings;  and  if 
in  these  pages  we  have  exulted  somewhat  over  the  successes  of 
our  delegates  in  checkmating  the  designs  of  our  European 
associates,  this  is  not  to  be  taken  as  any  boast  that  we  ourselves 
were  too  disinterested  and  altruistic  to  overlook  the  main 
chance  for  ourselves.  The  truth  is  that,  although  all  the  belli- 
gerents were  in  the  field  primarily  to  win  a  victory  of  arms, 
not  one  of  them  entirely  lost  contact  with  the  counting  room. 
This  was  clearly  shown  in  the  American  arrangements  for  the 
supply  of  French  artillery. 

The  numerical  expansion  of  the  A.  E.  F.  in  the  spring  and 
summer  of  1918  resulted  in  a  greatly  increased  demand  by  the 
A.  E.  F.  for  French  artillery  and  ammunition.  America  sup- 
plied schedules  of  the  raw  materials  which  she  could  furnish, 
and  the  French  made  estimates  of  the  numbers  of  guns  they 
could  deliver  monthly  to  the  A.  E.  F.  But  this  was  all  under- 
standing and  mutual  agreement — no  formal  contract  was 
drawn.  When  Mr.  Stettinius  reached  Paris  in  the  summer  of 
1918,  he  immediately  began  to  press  to  get  this  agreement 
down  in  black  and  white,  so  that  America  might  know  exactly 
what  her  obligations  were.  At  that  time,  of  course,  there  was 
no  thought  that  the  war  would  end  within  the  year.  About 
the  1st  of  November,  however,  it  became  evident  that  an 
armistice  was  drawing  near,  and  immediately  the  Americans 
grew  lukewarm  on  the  subject  of  a  formal  contract.  The  reason 
was  evident.  Under  the  terms  of  a  formal  contract,  America's 


3o6  DEMOBILIZATION 

termination  obligations  would  be  questions  of  fact;  with  the 
affair  left  as  an  unwritten  agreement,  our  obligations  would  be 
questions  of  equity,  to  be  negotiated,  and  we  were  likely  to 
emerge  from  such  negotiations  in  better  case  financially  than 
we  should  be  if  held  by  the  set  and  rigid  conditions  of  a  formal 
contract. 

Nevertheless,  the  United  States  did  not  seek  to  evade  its 
just  obligations  under  the  French  ordnance  agreement.  France 
had  spent  large  sums  of  money  in  expanding  the  industry  to 
take  care  of  the  expected  American  consumption,  and  the 
money  so  spent  was  a  proper  charge  against  the  United  States 
in  any  settlement.  Immediately  after  the  armistice  Mr.  Stet- 
tinius  ordered  production  stopped  on  our  orders;  but  this  the 
French,  for  domestic,  social,  and  economic  reasons,  were  unable 
to  do;  and  at  first  they  were  inclined  to  insist  that  we  should 
accept  and  pay  for  a  large  quantity  of  artillery  produced  during 
a  gradual  termination  of  the  industry.  Mr.  Stettinius  success- 
fully maintained  the  position  that  this  post-armistice  produc- 
tion was  undertaken  purely  in  pursuance  of  an  internal  policy 
of  the  French  Government  and  that  by  no  stretch  of  logic 
could  it  be  entered  as  a  proper  war  charge  against  the  United 
States.  Mr.  Stettinius  then  went  on  to  conduct  the  settlement 
negotiations,  and  these  were  about  complete  when  the  Liquida- 
tion Commission  arrived  to  inherit  the  transaction  and  to  draw 
the  final  settlement  contract. 

As  in  the  settlement  of  the  British  artillery  contract,  the 
American  negotiators  accepted  guns  and  ammunition  produced 
after  the  armistice  by  the  French;  and  they  did  it  in  complete 
consistency  with  the  position  and  policy  defined  in  the  pre- 
ceding paragraph.  The  armistice  found  great  numbers  of 
French  guns  in  process  of  manufacture  for  the  A.  E.  F.  The 
United  States  was  obligated  to  accept  and  pay  for  this  un- 
finished material.  After  the  inventory  of  it  had  been  taken,  the 
Liquidation  Commission  suggested  that  in  lieu  of  the  unfin- 
ished parts  the  United  States  accept  their  value  in  full  comple- 
tions and  that  the  production  of  all  other  guns  be  canceled 
without  charge  to  the  United  States.  This  alternative,  allow- 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  307 

ing,  as  it  did,  a  measure  of  post-armistice  production  in  the 
French  mills,  the  French  Government  quickly  accepted  and, 
in  carrying  out  the  terms  of  the  subsequent  settlement  contract, 
delivered  to  the  United  States  944  75-millimeter  gun  units, 
700  155-millimeter  howitzer  units,  and  198  155-millimeter 
gun  units,  all  with  limbers  and  with  additional  parts  as  spares. 
For  these  the  United  States  paid  1 17,501,887.45  francs. 

The  French  agreed  to  a  similar  plan  in  canceling  the  con- 
struction of  airplanes  and  engines  for  the  United  States.  This 
construction  had  been  undertaken  under  a  formal  contract, 
signed  by  General  Pershing.  The  contract  contained  no  can- 
cellation clause,  but  the  French  Government  had  provided  for 
cancellation  in  its  subcontracts  with  the  French  producers. 
Under  the  terms  of  the  contract  large  numbers  of  airplane 
cellules  (airplanes  without  engines),  engines,  and  other  aero- 
nautical supplies  were  in  production  on  the  day  of  the  armi- 
stice. In  lieu  of  unfinished  parts,  the  French  agreed  to  deliver 
their  equivalent  (in  value)  in  finished  equipment.  Under  a 
preliminary  agreement  the  United  States  acknowledged  a  can- 
cellation debt  of  167,667,761  francs.  Of  this,  about  23,000,- 
000  francs  represented  cancellation  charges  and  the  rest  money 
to  be  paid  for  completed  materials,  the  schedule  of  which  in- 
cluded 3,568  cellules  and  3,979  engines.  This  preliminary- 
agreement,  however,  was  modified  later  by  the  French  Liberty 
engine  settlement  negotiated  by  the  Cuthell  Board.  Under  this 
settlement  France  agreed  to  accept  and  pay  for  Liberty  engines 
still  to  be  delivered,  to  the  value  of  $19,530,000,  and  in  addi- 
tion to  pay  nearly  $2,000,000  in  cancellation  indemnities. 

This,  then,  was  the  situation.  We  were  bound  to  accept  and 
pay  for  a  large  number  of  French  airplanes  and  engines  which 
we  did  not  need.  The  French  were  bound  to  accept  and  pay 
for  a  large  number  of  Liberty  engines  which  they  did  not  need. 
We  could,  however,  use  some  of  the  French  planes  and  engines, 
and  the  French  wanted  500  Liberty  engines.  Therefore  we 
agreed  to  deliver  the  500  engines  and  to  accept  French  mate- 
rials up  to  their  value,  and  then  to  offset  the  excess  number  of 
Liberties  provided  for  in  the  engine  settlement   agreement 


3o8  DEMOBILIZATION 

against  the  excess  of  French  air  materials  named  in  the  French 
aircraft  settlement  contract.  This  left  a  surplus  of  Liberty- 
engines  with  the  A.  E.  F.,  but  these  were  delivered  to  the 
British  to  fulfill  our  obligations  under  the  British  Liberty 
engine  settlement;  and  a  few  of  the  engines  were  sold  to 
Poland. 

The  settlement  with  France  for  our  use  of  her  railroads 
during  the  war  was  so  complicated  that  it  would  not  be 
profitable  to  go  into  the  details  here.  The  intricacy  of  the 
problem  was  due  to  the  fact  that,  while  2,000,000  Americans 
in  France  had  used  the  French  railroads  for  every  transporta- 
tion need, — and  our  forces  fought  farther  from  their  expedi- 
tionary bases  than  did  any  other  army  in  France, — we,  in  turn, 
had  supplied  to  the  French  railroads  locomotives,  cars,  crews, 
repairing,  coal,  track  construction,  and  many  other  items.  The 
Liquidation  Commission  itself  did  not  attempt  to  go  into  these 
details,  but  turned  the  whole  transaction  over  to  a  special 
section  headed  by  Colonel  F.  A.  Delano,  the  Deputy  Director 
General  of  Transportation  for  the  A.  E.  F.,  who  had  formerly 
been  president  of  the  Wabash  Railroad  and  a  member  of  the 
Federal  Reserve  Board.  The  upshot  of  the  settlement  was  that 
we  acknowledged  a  debt  to  France  of  434,985,399.73  francs 
after  all  our  claims  had  been  set  off  against  the  French  claim. 

The  United  States  Liquidation  Commission  agreed  to  pay 
to  the  French  Government  the  sum  of  3,000,000  francs  for 
port  dues  assessed  against  our  vessels  for  their  use  of  French 
ports  during  the  war. 

When  these  and  other  subsidiary  questions  of  settlement 
had  been  decided  and  the  proper  credits  established  by  agree- 
ment in  each  instance,  the  United  States  Liquidation  Com- 
mission took  up  the  task  of  a  general  blanket  settlement  of  the 
business  relations  between  France  and  the  United  States 
during  the  war.  This  was  a  long  and  involved  work;  but,  since 
the  major  items  in  the  settlement  had  already  been  determined, 
there  was  little  difficulty  in  securing  an  agreement.  The  Gen- 
eral Settlement  was  dated  November  25,  1919.  It  embraced 
all  transactions  between  the  two  nations  from  April  6,  1917, 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  309 

to  August  20,  1919,  except  (1)  France's  purchases  of  our 
surplus  military  property,  (2)  the  railroad  transportation  and 
the  port  dues  settlements  noted  above,  and  (3)  France's  claim 
arising  from  the  overseas  transportation  of  American  troops  in 
French  transports.  The  sum  total  of  the  other  claims  showed 
that  the  United  States  owed  France  1,488,619,027.52  francs 
and  that  France  owed  the  United  States  $177,149,866.86. 
The  rate  of  exchange  and  form  of  payment  were  left  to  future 
negotiations  by  the  United  States  Treasury ;  but,  assuming  that 
francs  were  worth  ten  to  the  dollar,  the  net  balance  in  favor  of 
the  United  States  was  about  $28,000,000. 

We  are  not  yet  ready,  however,  to  determine  the  net  finan- 
cial result  of  the  international  war  business  relations  in  which 
America  was  a  participant.  There  was  still  the  money  to  be 
realized  from  the  sale  of  our  surplus  military  property  abroad. 
It  will  be  remembered  that  one  of  the  two  functions  of  the 
United  States  Liquidation  Commission  was  to  dispose  of  the 
expeditionary  property.  Out  of  the  sales  transactions  arose  the 
largest  single  credit  to  the  account  of  the  United  States  on 
the  international  ledger:  the  proceeds  from  the  bulk  sale  of 
A.  E.  F.  installations  and  supplies  to  the  French  Government. 

The  arguments  sustaining  the  wisdom  of  a  bulk  sale  of  the 
expeditionary  property  have  already  been  sufficiently  re- 
hearsed in  this  volume.  The  first  step  on  our  part  leading  to 
the  negotiations  was  to  take  an  inventory  of  the  entire  prop- 
erty. The  difficulty  encountered  then  may  be  deduced  from 
the  fact  that  the  French  and  the  British,  whose  surpluses  were 
not  inordinately  greater  than  ours,  never  even  attempted  such 
an  inventory  of  their  own  property.  The  A.  E.  F.  was  a  going 
concern,  continually  drawing  from  the  stocks  on  hand,  and  its 
personnel  was  shifting  and  diminishing.  Nevertheless,  by  a 
strong  force  of  men,  under  the  direction  of  Colonel  J.  H.  Gra- 
ham, Engineer  Corps,  in  six  weeks  of  day  and  night  work,  such 
an  inventory  was  taken,  the  property  being  divided  into  eight- 
een categories,  as  follows:  1.  Clothing  and  textiles;  2.  Sub- 
sistence supplies;  3.  Kitchen  utensils  and  household  furnish- 
ings; 4.  Machinery,  metals,  tools,  and  hardware;  5.  Building 


3 1  o  DEMOBILIZATION 

materials;  6.  Forest  products;  7.  Railway  and  dock  equip- 
ment; 8.  Transport  equipment  (trucks,  motor  cars,  motor- 
cycles, wagons,  horses  and  mules,  etc.);  9,  Hospital  supplies, 
toilet  supplies,  and  chemicals;  10.  Photographic,  measuring, 
and  musical  instruments;  11.  Electrical  equipment;  12.  Oils, 
gasoline,  and  paints;  13.  Ordnance  and  gas-warfare  equip- 
ment; 14.  Blasting  apparatus  and  supplies;  15.  Printing 
machinery  and  supplies;  16.  Office  fixtures,  stationery,  and 
supplies;  17.  Hides  and  leather;  i8.  Aeronautical  equipment. 

These  eighteen  categories  included  only  the  movable  prop- 
erty of  the  A.  E.  F.  There  were  still  to  be  considered  the 
fixed  installations — the  barracks,  camps,  hospitals,  warehouses, 
docks,  railroad  yards,  buildings  of  almost  every  conceivable 
type.  Judge  Parker,  the  chairman  of  the  Commission,  cabled 
to  France,  before  he  sailed  for  Europe,  a  direction  that  the 
installations  be  inventoried  and  appraised.  This  work  was  first 
undertaken  by  Colonel  Graham,  who  later,  after  he  took  charge 
of  the  inventory  of  movables,  was  succeeded  by  Brigadier 
General  Edgar  Jadwin,  whose  subsequent  appraisal  was  known 
as  the  Jadwin  Report.  It  showed  the  war  cost  of  construction 
to  have  been  $165,661,000,  the  normal  cost  $81,543,000,  and 
the  armistice  value  $39,256,000.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  any  sum 
obtainable  for  the  installations  was  clear  gain,  since  the  salvage 
value  of  the  structures  would  not  have  paid  the  cost  of  dis- 
mantling (assuming  that  this  work  would  have  required  the 
labor  of  40,000  men  for  seven  months),  the  ground  rentals, 
and  the  costs  of  restoring  the  sites  to  their  original  condition. 

Then  arose  the  determination  of  the  "utilization  value"  of 
the  movable  stocks.  This  was  estimated  by  taking  the  war  cost 
of  production,  plus  the  cost  of  freighting  the  goods  to  France, 
and  subtracting  various  estimated  allowances — for  natural 
deterioration,  for  expected  losses  from  fire,  theft,  and  other 
causes,  for  the  saving  to  the  United  States  in  costs  of  merchan- 
dizing, labor,  storage,  insurance,  interest  on  investment,  and 
other  overhead  expense  obviated  by  a  possible  bulk  sale,  for 
the  fact  that  the  stocks  were  widely  scattered  and  had  to  be 
collected  to  be  of  use.  The  Commission  consolidated  these  sub- 


Photo  by  Howard  E.   Coffin 

WRECK  OF  COAL  MINE  AT  LENS 


Photo  by  Signal  Corps 

MOTOR  TRANSPORT  SALVAGE  IN  FRANCE 


,«J|,:  fTJ 

WPt''l| 

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— .r  i|i 

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1 

% 

From  a  photograph  taken  in  France 

INTERALLIED  PURCHASERS 

Left  to  right :  Louis  Loucheur,  French  Minister  of  Munitions ;  Winston 
Churchill,  British  Minister  of  Munitions ;  David  Lloyd-George,  Prime 
Minister  of  England ;  and  Bernard  M.  Baruch,  Chairman  of  the  War 
Industries  Board. 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  311 

tractions  into  a  lump  deduction  of  25  per  cent  of  the  estimated 
value.  Thus  determined,  the  utilization  value  of  both  installa- 
tions and  movables  was  set  at  $562,230,800;  and  this  was  the 
figure  carried  by  the  Commission  into  the  negotiations  with 
the  French. 

The  French  Government  designated  M.  Paul  Morel,  the 
French  Undersecretary  of  Finance  for  the  Liquidation  of  War 
Stocks,  to  represent  it  in  the  negotiations  with  the  Commission. 
On  April  7,  1919,  it  was  agreed  in  principle  that  France  would 
buy  the  American  installations^  at  any  rate,  at  a  price  still 
to  be  fixed,  the  French  assuming  all  charges  and  claims  against 
the  installations.  The  French  were  not  so  sure  about  the  mov- 
ables. M.  Morel  first  proposed  that  the  French  Government 
pick  out  what  it  wanted  and  negotiate  a  price  for  the  selection. 
But  this  would  have  skimmed  the  cream  of  the  American 
property  and  left  the  A.  E.  F.  with  large  quantities  of  unsal- 
able materials  which  in  all  likelihood  would  eventually  have 
become  fuel  for  bonfires.  This  proposal  was  therefore  rejected, 
and  the  French  representatives  were  urged  as  a  duty  to  buy 
all  the  movables  in  bulk,  since  the  French  people  could  use 
practically  all  the  supplies.  M.  Morel,  after  consultation  with 
his  principals,  eventually  agreed  to  buy  all  the  stocks  at  a 
price  to  be  fixed. 

Came  the  question  then  of  the  price.  M.  Morel's  first  bid 
was  1,500,000,000  francs.  Reckoning  the  value  of  francs  then 
at  ten  to  the  dollar,  that  was  an  offer  of  $150,000,000,  an  offer 
firmly  rejected.  This  was  followed  by  other  offers  which  our 
representatives  could  not  entertain.  The  negotiations,  which 
had  begun  early  in  April,  continued  throughout  the  spring  and 
the  fore  part  of  the  summer.  M.  Andre  Tardieu  and  other  emi- 
nent Frenchmen  entered  the  conferences  in  July.  On  July  24 
a  tentative  agreement  was  reached,  and  its  terms  were  prac- 
tically those  of  the  bulk-sale  contract,  which  was  dated 
August  1,  1919. 

France  paid  $400,000,000  for  the  property,  the  United 
States  accepting  in  payment  interest-bearing  10-year  French 
bonds.  Not  all  the  property  listed  in  the  original  inventory  was 


3 1 2  DEMOBILIZATION 

involved  in  the  sale.  America  made  certain  exceptions:  (i)  all 
animals  (these  were  sold  separately  for  a  total  of  $29,016,- 
506.59)  ;  (2)  supplies  previously  sold  out  of  the  surplus  stocks 
to  France  herself  and  other  buyers  to  the  value  of  $77,265,- 
597,83;  (3)  military  equipment  returned  to  the  United  States, 
valued  at  $15,000,000;  (4)  supplies  needed  for  the  mainte- 
nance of  the  remnant  of  the  A.  E.  F.,  worth  $4,000,000 ;  and 
(5)  supplies  worth  $10,000,000  turned  over  to  the  American 
Red  Cross  as  a  gift.  Thus,  the  utilization  value  of  the  original 
inventory  was  scaled  down  by  these  subtractions  to  approxi- 
mately $427,000,000,  and  for  this  quantity  the  French  Gov- 
ernment paid  $400,000,000 — a  fair  return.  It  should  be  noted 
that  in  paying  this  price  the  French  Government  also  canceled 
its  claim  for  the  payment  of  customs  duties  on  the  goods,  and 
a  conservative  estimate  placed  the  aggregate  amount  of  these 
unpaid  duties  at  $150,000,000.  An  even  greater  benefit  to  us 
was  the  fact  that  by  the  terms  of  the  settlement  France  as- 
sumed all  land  claims  which  might  otherwise  have  been  pressed 
upon  the  United  States  by  French  nationals  for  years  to  come. 
The  bulk  sale  to  France  was  the  largest  single  transaction 
in  the  disposition  of  the  A.  E.  F.  surplus ;  but  there  were  many 
other  sales,  some  of  them  large.  Goods  went  in  these  transac- 
tions to  the  governments  of  the  Allies  (France  herself,  outside 
the  general  sale,  being  a  purchaser  to  the  extent  of  $95,000,- 
000),  to  individuals,  companies,  and  syndicates  in  western 
Europe,  to  relief  societies,  to  cooperative  societies  in  the  Bal- 
kans (these,  being  the  economic  organization  of  whole  peoples, 
were  not  affected  by  political  changes  and  sometimes  seemed  to 
have  greater  stability  than  the  new  governments  themselves), 
to  the  governments  of  the  so-called  "liberated  nations,"  and 
to  other  purchasers.  Although  the  United  States  Liquidation 
Commission  made  every  effort  to  keep  each  transaction  on  the 
dollar  basis,  it  was  not  always  possible  to  do  so,  and  payments 
were  accepted  in  pounds  sterling,  in  francs,  in  marks,  and  in 
other  European  currency,  sometimes  much  depreciated.  Yet, 
translating  foreign  money  into  terms  of  the  dollar  at  average 
rates  of  exchange,  and  adding  in  the  $400,000,000  received 


THE  FOREIGN  LIQUIDATION  313 

from  France,  we  reach  a  total  of  approximately  $800,000,000 
received  by  the  United  States  for  the  entire  quantity  of  Ameri- 
can military  property  left  in  Europe  after  the  return  of  the 
expedition.  It  is  roughly  estimated  that  the  property  thus  sold 
cost  the  United  States  $1,328,000,000.  The  salvage  return, 
therefore,  was  practically  60  per  cent  of  the  cost.  The  mis- 
cellaneous sales  transactions  have  practically  all  been  closed, 
and  the  receipts  have  been  covered  into  the  Treasury.  The 
French  $400,000,000  is  represented  by  bonds  maturing  in 
1929. 

The  two  blanket  transactions  with  France — the  bulk  sale  of 
buildings  and  supplies  and  the  general  settlement  of  claims — 
were  of  great  value  to  the  United  States  in  relieving  this  nation 
of  the  responsibility  of  having  to  deal  with  individual  French 
claimants.  In  taking  over  all  the  A.  E.  F.  installations  the 
French  Government  agreed  to  hold  the  United  States  harmless 
from  all  claims  for  property  damage  and  restoration.  In  the 
general  settlement  the  French  Government  assumed  responsi- 
bility for  all  other  claims  of  French  nationals  against  the 
United  States  and  agreed  to  settle  with  the  claimants.  If, 
however,  the  claims  paid  by  France  exceed  12,000,000  francs, 
America  is  bound  to  pay  the  excess  up  to  6,000,000  francs. 
Except  for  this  arrangement,  the  American  Government  would 
have  had  to  maintain  in  France  for  years  an  organization  for 
dealing  with  French  individuals'  claims. 

We  are  now  in  position  to  see  in  close  approximation  the 
financial  result  to  the  United  States  of  the  international  war 
business.  On  the  credit  side  we  have  the  Cuthell  settlements, 
amounting  to  $48,716,080.99  in  all — this  figure,  however,  not 
including  the  Cuthell  Board's  settlement  with  the  French,  the 
debt  of  France  on  her  American  war  contracts  being  carried 
over  into  the  general  settlement  effected  by  the  United  States 
Liquidation  Commission.  We  have,  as  a  further  credit,  the 
6,000,000  francs  which  were  the  American  share  of  the  French 
payment  in  the  liquidation  of  the  Anglo-American  heavy  tank 
project.   Finally,  the  general  settlement  of  the  Liquidation 


314  DEMOBILIZATION 

Commission  with  the  French  Government  brought  to  the  Treas- 
ury the  further  sum  of  $28,000,000.  To  all  these  credits  must 
be  added  the  $800,000,000  received  from  the  sale  of  the 
A.  E.  F.  property.  The  sum  of  all  the  American  credits 
(counting  ten  francs  as  a  dollar)  is  approximately  $877,- 
000,000. 

From  this  credit,  however,  we  must  subtract,  first,  £17,726,- 
685  13s  13d  as  the  American  obligation  embodied  in  the  ter- 
mination contracts  made  with  the  British  Government  by  the 
Liquidation  Commission,  and  £2,946,511  2s  8d  as  our  debt 
to  England  under  the  Burr-Niemeyer  Agreement.  We  must 
subtract  also  the  $3,568,653.23  paid  by  the  A.  E.  F.  in  can- 
cellation charges  to  individual  European  contractors.  A  final 
subtraction  is  the  437,985,399.73  francs  paid  by  the  Liquida- 
tion Commission  for  port  dues  and  for  the  transportation  of 
the  A.  E.  F.  on  French  railroads.  Translating  pounds  sterling 
and  francs  into  dollars  at  average  exchange  rates,  the  total 
debit  of  the  United  States  is  found  to  have  been  about  $120,- 
000,000.  The  net  balance,  therefore,  in  favor  of  the  United 
States  as  a  result  of  the  international  war  industrial  transac- 
tions was  the  sum,  approximately,  of  $757,000,000. 


CHAPTER  XIX 
THE  BALANCE  SHEET 

WHAT  did  the  war  cost  America?  It  may  be  that 
an  accurate  answer  to  that  question  will  never 
be  given.  Certainly  it  cannot  be  given  now, 
when  the  stocks  of  surplus  materials  are  still  being  sold  and 
the  final  settlements  of  the  more  difficult  claims  are  still  being 
made.  Still,  we  can  arrive  at  a  fair  approximation  of  what  the 
war  cost  the  War  Department  alone.  In  doing  so  we  must 
deal  with  billions  of  dollars  in  our  columns,  and  therefore 
errors  and  differences  of  a  few  millions,  or  even  of  a  few  hun- 
dred millions,  have  no  important  effect  upon  the  totals.  Even 
if  all  costs  and  credits  could  be  figured  out  to  the  penny,  the 
result  would  not  be  much  unlike  the  estimates  which  follow. 
As  a  starting  point  we  can  take  the  appropriations  for  the 
Army  made  by  Congress,  since  all  the  war  costs  of  the  War 
Department  must  be  included  within  those  appropriations. 
And  we  find  that  for  the  Army  Congress  appropriated  in  all, 
for  every  war  purpose,  the  sum  of  $24,373,274,223.67.  But 
not  all  these  appropriations  were  expended.  Some  were  made 
late  in  the  war,  and  none  of  the  money  authorized  by  these 
acts  to  be  spent  was  even  obligated  before  the  armistice  ter- 
minated all  proposed  new  projects.  Congress  hastened  to  repeal 
the  untouched  appropriations,  and  the  various  repeal  acts 
canceled  authorizations  to  the  amount  of  $7,703,448,569.36. 
Therefore,  the  net  amount  made  available  to  the  War  Depart- 
ment by  the  war  appropriations  was  $16,669,825,654.31. 

This  figure  still  does  not  represent  the  gross  war  cost  of 
maintaining  the  War  Department,  but  it  is  close  to  it.  Since 
final  expenditures  and  reimbursements  have  not  yet  been  de- 
termined, but  are  still  growing,  as  claims  are  paid  and  surplus 
property  is  sold,  it  is  necessary  that  we  accept  a  date  some- 


3 1 6  DEMOBILIZATION 

where  and  examine  the  ledger  on  that  day,  and  from  this 
examination  we  may  be  able  to  estimate  closely  the  final 
figures.  The  date  chosen  here  is  April  17,  1920, — a  day  far 
enough  this  side  of  the  armistice  to  bring  the  figures  fairly 
close  to  their  ultimate  and  conclusive  form.  By  that  day  the 
Army  was  almost  completely  demobilized,  the  liquidation  of 
the  Army's  foreign  affairs  was  virtually  complete,  the  de- 
mobilization of  the  domestic  war  industry  was  approaching  the 
end,  and  the  greater  part  of  the  surplus  war  supplies  had 
been  sold. 

On  April  17,  1920,  then,  we  find  that  the  actual  expendi- 
tures of  the  War  Department  had  reached  the  total  of  $16,- 
276,288,337.19.  This  was  within  $400,000,000  of  the  net  war 
appropriations,  the  difference,  of  course,  being  in  the  Treasury 
as  unexpended  balances  available  to  those  paying  the  final  war 
bills  of  the  War  Department.  Yet  this  expenditure  cannot  be 
labeled  the  cash  cost  of  the  war  to  the  Army.  We  must  first 
make  several  large  deductions  for  money  derived  from  sales 
of  materials  and,  especially,  for  the  property  on  hand  set 
aside  for  the  permanent  Army  and  for  the  military  readiness 
of  the  United  States. 

The  foreign  liquidation,  as  we  have  seen,  recovered  into  the 
Treasury  approximately  $757,000,000.  On  April  17,  1920, 
the  sales  of  military  property  in  the  United  States  had  brought 
in  the  sum  of  $641,261,000.  Transfers  of  army  property  for 
use  by  other  departments  of  the  Government — a  proper  credit 
— involved  materials  valued  at  $42,096,000.  On  the  date 
selected  there  still  remained  in  the  United  States  surplus,  but 
unsold,  army  property  valued  at  $600,000,000.  The  average 
recovery  from  the  sale  of  surplus  within  the  United  States  was 
about  75  per  cent  of  the  cost.  Assuming  that  this  ratio  would 
hold  throughout  the  entire  liquidation,  we  can  anticipate  a 
cash  recovery  of  $450,000,000  from  the  surplus  still  existing 
on  April  17,  1920.* 

These  reimbursements,  however,  even  in  the  aggregate,  con- 

*  Due  to  the  slump  in  business  and  prices  in  1921,  this  estimate  is  probably 
too  high. 


THE  BALANCE  SHEET  317 

stitute  a  minor  credit  when  compared  with  the  value  of  the 
equipment  left  by  the  war  enterprise  to  be  the  inheritance  of 
the  permanent  establishment  and  to  be  insurance  of  the  con- 
tinued safety  of  the  United  States  in  a  world  not  yet  willing 
to  lay  down  its  arms.  The  property  of  the  War  Department 
at  the  beginning  of  the  war  with  Germany  was  estimated  to  be 
worth  $500,000,000.  At  the  end  of  the  demobilization  the 
property  of  the  War  Department  was  worth,  at  a  rough 
estimate,  $6,000,000,000.  It  is  evident,  therefore,  that  this 
increment  in  value — $5,500,000,000 — represents  present  use- 
ful property,  and  that  it  must  be  subtracted  from  the  expendi- 
tures in  order  to  arrive  at  the  net  cost  of  the  war  itself.  This 
valuation  of  property  on  hand,  incidentally,  does  not  include 
the  value  of  real  estate  and  buildings  acquired  during  the  war 
and  retained  in  use  afterwards,  since  it  has  never  been  fully 
determined  as  yet  which  of  these  installations  will  be  kept. 

The  deductions,  then,  on  account  of  sales  and  on  account  of 
property  retained,  amount  to  $7,390,000,000,  and  this  is  the 
gross  credit  on  the  war  page  of  the  army  ledger.  To  find  the 
net  cost  of  the  war  proper,  we  must  subtract  this  from  the 
gross  expenditures,  and  we  must  do  this  roughly;  because  with 
transactions  so  large,  indefinite,  and  complicated,  it  becomes 
absurd  to  reduce  the  figures  to  cents  or  even  to  thousands  of 
dollars.  The  rough  subtraction  gives  us  the  figure  $8,885,000,- 
000,  which  is  not  many  millions  away  from  the  actual  net 
cost.  This,  of  course,  represents  cost  to  the  War  Department 
alone.  It  does  not  include  the  Navy's  costs,  nor  those  of  the 
United  States  Shipping  Board,  nor  of  the  United  States  Rail- 
road Administration,  nor  any  costs  of  other  great  and  expen- 
sive war  enterprises  which  properly  must  be  added  in  to  give 
the  full  score  of  the  cost  of  the  war  to  the  United  States. 

This  net  cost,  this  sum  of  $8,885,000,000,  represents  what 
the  Government  paid  in  transporting  the  4,000,000  men  of 
the  Anny,  in  feeding  them,  clothing  them,  and  providing  them 
with  all  other  sorts  of  expendable  supplies  which  they  actually 
consumed,  and  in  paying  the  troops  their  wages.  The  supply 
cost,  of  course,  includes  the  cost  of  the  industrial  liquidation 


3 1 8  DEMOBILIZATION 

after  the  armistice  and  the  losses  from  the  shrinkages  and 
wastes  of  war.  The  whole  bill  comes  out  at  about  $2,200  a 
man. 

This,  too,  is  but  the  direct  cash  cost,  the  cost  in  money.  The 
intangible  costs,  which  are  never  brought  into  a  tabulation  of 
this  kind,  are,  after  all,  the  true  costs  of  war.  They  include 
the  50,000  American  soldiers  killed  in  battle  in  Europe.  They 
include  also  the  200,000  Americans  who  were  wounded  in  the 
fighting — some  of  them  still,  two  and  a  half  years  after  the 
armistice,  in  hospitals  and  thousands  of  them  facing  life  with 
permanently  impaired  bodies.  These  usually  unreckoned  costs, 
too,  include  the  57,000  who  died  of  disease  or  accident  while 
in  the  service. 

But  beyond  these  losses  of  life  there  were  other  profound 
penalties  which  the  people  paid  and  are  still  paying.  These, 
too,  must  be  set  down  to  the  account  of  war  in  any  complete 
reckoning.  One  of  them  was  the  greatly  increased  cost  of  almost 
everything  necessary  to  sustain  life  and  render  it  pleasant, 
including  particularly  an  increase  of  rentals,  bringing  with  it, 
as  a  natural  consequence,  the  overcrowding  of  living  quarters, 
to  the  detriment  of  the  health  of  those  existing  in  such  condi- 
tions. The  high  costs  of  living  are  aggravated  by  the  special 
war  taxes  laid  everywhere,  taxes  which,  in  one  form  or  another, 
must  be  imposed  for  many  years  to  come  in  order  to  pay  for 
the  losses  of  the  war. 

There  were,  moreover,  spiritual  losses — an  incredible  moral 
slump  from  the  national  exaltation  of  the  war  to  the  bickering 
and  bitterness  of  the  demobilization.  Governments  fell  as  the 
war-ridden  peoples  of  the  earth  blindly  and  brutishly  vented 
their  spleen  and  irritation  for  the  hardships  they  had  experi- 
enced upon  those  who  chanced  to  be  in  power.  Erstwhile  states- 
manship lapsed  into  a  narrow,  advantage-seeking  partizanship 
that  regarded  not,  it  sometimes  seemed  in  this  country,  even  the 
fate  of  the  world.  The  United  States  turned  its  back  upon  the 
League  of  Nations,  which  was  the  most  ambitious  attempt  ever 
made  by  the  nations  of  the  earth  to  substitute  a  rule  of  reason 
for  the  rule  of  force. 


THE  BALANCE  SHEET  319 

But  if  we  recite  these  and  other  intangible  and  indirect  costs 
that  might  be  named,  then  we  are  equally  justified  in  looking 
for  the  benefits  derived  from  our  participation  in  the  war ;  and 
we  find  these  benefits  to  be  great  ones.  First  of  all,  we  gained 
the  victory;  and  that  alone,  and  especially  so  because  the  cause 
of  America  was  righteous,  was  worth  all  it  cost  in  blood  and 
money  and  burdens  shouldered  for  the  future.  We  gained, 
moreover,  a  state  of  preparedness  for  war  that  would  have  been 
impossible  of  attainment  under  any  other  circumstances.  In  the 
reserves  of  supplies  we  have  equipment  ready  to  arm  1,000,- 
000  men  as  rapidly  as  they  can  take  the  field.  In  the  reserves 
of  machinery  we  have  a  potential  war  industry  capable  of 
maintaining  such  an  army  until  industry  generally  can  take 
up  the  manufacture  of  munitions.  Not  again  during  the  exist- 
ence of  the  present  generation  should  we,  if  the  emergency 
came,  have  to  experience  the  uncertainties  and  delays  of  1917 
in  the  production  of  supplies.  We  have  within  our  war  reserves 
the  machinery  and  the  materials  for  producing  all  the  more 
difl^cult  sorts  of  munitions,  and  we  have,  moreover,  preserved 
records  of  how  to  produce  them. 

Then,  again,  the  health  of  the  nation  has  presumably  gained 
a  benefit  from  the  experience.  Hundreds  of  thousands  of  young 
men  were  removed  from  sedentary  occupations  and  placed  in 
the  vigorous,  ordered,  athletic  regimen  of  camp  life.  Several 
months  of  this,  on  the  average,  did  not  fail  to  have  its  effect, 
and  the  medical  records  of  the  Army  showed  a  marked  increase 
in  the  average  weight  of  soldiers  during  the  war.  Akin  to  this 
consideration  is  the  fact  that  men  were  picked  up  from  farms, 
villages,  and  city  neighborhoods  and  transported  to  distant 
parts  of  the  earth.  This  travel  broadened  thousands  of  them, 
quickened  their  ambition,  and  strengthened  their  life  purposes. 
Moreover,  the  men  of  the  Army  were  thoroughly  mixed  in  the 
ranks  and  services.  The  boy  from  Maine  fraternized  with  the 
one  from  Arizona,  and  Illinois  and  Virginia  sent  their  sons  to 
be  comrades.  Sectional,  national,  and  even  racial  lines  dis- 
appeared in  the  ranks.  This  extensive  regional  interacquaint- 
anceship  is  to-day  a  national  asset.  The  infiltration  of  4,000,- 


320  DEMOBILIZATION 

ooo  men  who  secured  these  individual  benefits  into  the  civilian 
life  of  America  is  calculated  to  elevate  the  physical,  mental, 
and  moral  tone  of  the  whole  nation  and  to  improve  America's 
homogeneity. 

Other  benefits  might  be  named.  The  principle  of  selective 
military  service  has  been  established  by  the  precedent  set  in 
the  World  War.  As  long  as  that  experience  is  remembered 
there  will  be  no  danger  that  America  would  ever  return,  in  any 
serious  emergency,  to  the  unscientific  volunteer  system  that 
takes  the  brave  and  the  enterprising  and  leaves  behind  the  in- 
dolent and  timorous.  Above  all,  we  must  count  as  gain  from 
the  war  the  confirmation  it  gave  us  in  our  faith  in  our  ability  to 
continue  our  existence  as  a  nation.  The  experience  demon- 
strated that  our  national  resources  include  not  only  valor  in 
arms  in  boundless  quantity,  but  also  the  ability  to  organize 
effectively  a  nation  as  great  as  ours  for  a  purpose  as  compli- 
cated as  modern  war  has  come  to  be.  The  experience  in  1917 
and  1918  gave  us  a  firm  foundation  for  national  self- 
confidence. 

These  are  all  benefits  and  gains  which  may  properly  be  set 
off  against  the  intangible  costs  of  the  war.  Among  the  benefits 
secured,  however,  is  not  yet  one  which  we  might,  in  1917  and 
1918,  have  expected  to  find  there.  The  American  host  which 
crossed  to  France  went,  almost  to  a  man,  uplifted  and  made 
heroic  by  the  feeling  that  it  was  an  army  of  crusaders  fighting 
to  end  wars  forever.  No  mere  instinct  of  self-preservation,  no 
simple  prospect  of  a  victory  over  a  strange,  foreign  enemy  in 
gray  uniforms,  could  have  inspired  the  morale  of  the  American 
Expeditionary  Forces,  nor  yet  that  of  the  forces  in  training  in 
the  United  States,  nor  that  of  American  industry  in  its  eager, 
headlong  devotion  to  the  national  undertaking.  This  was  to  be 
Armageddon,  the  last  of  wars,  the  war  to  make  safe  the  unwar- 
like  peoples  of  the  world;  and  no  cynical  dictum  that  man  is 
still  too  near  his  neolithic  savagery  to  rely  on  anything  other 
than  might  in  his  international  contentions,  no  Chauvinistic 
picture  of  new  migrations  of  Asiatic  hordes,  can  change  the 
fundamental  fact  that  America  went  to  war  in  the  belief  that 


THE  BALANCE  SHEET  321 

its  chief  est  object  was  to  end  war  forever.  Until  we  have  made 
some  national  attempt  to  secure  that  benefit,  the  page  will 
not  balance. 


\. 


INDEX 


ABERDEEN   PROVING 
,/\  GROUND,  176 

Abuse  of  Uniform,  109-110 

Agriculture,  Department  of: 
Army  supplies  transferred   to, 

43,  275-276 
Army  surplus  nitrate  sold  by,    274 

Aircraft : 

Production,  199-203 

Storage,  208 

Aircraft  Board,  204 

Aircraft     Industrial     Demobiliza- 
tion, 204-207 

Airplane  Engines: 

Returned  by  A.  E.  F.,  210 

Sale  of  surplus,  280 

War  production,  202-203,  206 

Airplane  Lumber,  280 

Airplane  Lumber  Claim,  293-294 

Airplanes : 

Burning  of  unserviceable,      211-213 
Contracts,  199 

Production,  202,  206 

Returned  by  A.  E.  F.,  210-211 

Sale  of  surplus,  280 

Air  Service : 

Demobilization  of, 

50,  133,  204,  207,  280-281 

Air  Service  Claims  Board,  204 

Air  Service  of  A.  E.  F. : 

Demobilization,  210-213 

Maintenance  cost,  203 

Allies : 

Business  settlement  with, 

287-288,  313-314 

Allotments,  71-72 

Amatol  Arsenal,  188 

American  Brake  Shoe  &  Foundry 
Co.: 
Builders     of     Eric     Howitzer 
Plant,  171 


American  Car  &  Foundry  Co.: 

Claim  of,  156 

Post-armistice  production  by,        179 

American  Cyanimid  Co.: 

Process    of,    at    Muscle    Shoals 
fixation  plant,  184 

American  Expeditionary  Forces: 
Identification  of  dead  of,    85,  89-91 
Repatriation  of,  38-42 

Strength  of,  1 

Welfare  activities  in,  92-97 

American  Legion : 

And  abuse  of  uniform,  110 

And  bonus,  69 

And  disabled  veterans,  104 

American  Red  Cross : 

Bonus  payment  aided  by,  69 

Demobilization  camp  banks  of,     no 
Soldier  reemployment  campaign 
aided  by,  109 

Ammonium  Nitrate,  274 

Ammunition,  Artillery : 

Disposal  of,  188-190 

Anglo-American  Tank  Project, 

298-300 

Anglo-American  Tanks: 

Purchase  of  British  parts  for, 

300-301 

Animals : 

See  Horses  and  Mules 

Appel,  Monte : 
Claims    against    French    settled 
by,  295 

Appraisers,       War       Department 

Board  of,  142 

Army: 

Status   of   demobilization,   Feb- 
ruary 28,  1919,  50 
Strength,  l 

Army  Retail  Stores,  282-285 

Army  Subsistence  School,  247-248 


324  INDEX 

Artillery  Carriages : 

Demobilization  of  industry  pro- 
ducing, 174-175 
Artillery,  Field : 

Production,  164,  175,  176 

Reserve  manufacturing  facilities 

for,  168,  172 

Reserves  of,  175,  176 

Artillery,  Motorization  of,  194 

Artillery,  Railway : 

Demobilization  of  industry  pro- 
ducing, 176-180 
Assistant  Secretary  of  War,  The : 
As    president   of   War    Depart- 
ment Claims  Board,  135 
Purchase  of  cantonment  sites 
ordered  by,                                     265 
Attorney  General : 

Ruling    of,   against   commission 
agents,  123 

Ayer,  Lieut.  Col.  F.  R.: 

On  Ordnance  Claims  Board,  147 


CONRAD 


Regiment" 


T3ABCOCK,   COL 

"Pershing's      Own 
trained  by. 
Baggage,  Military, 

See  also  Lost  Baggage 
Baggage  Service, 
Baldridge,  Private  C.  LeRoy : 

On  Stars  and  Stripes, 
Balloons,  203, 

Barnes,  Lieut.  Col.  A.  V.: 

Chief    of    Baltimore    ordnance 
district, 
Bausch  &  Lomb  Optical  Co. : 

Optical  glass  produced  by,      192-193 
Beaune,  University  of,  93 

Belgian  Government: 

Supplies  sold  to,       189,  216,  241,  252 
Belgian  Relief  Commission,  241 

Benson,  Admiral  William  S.: 

And  German  passenger  vessels,      36 
Billy,  M.  fidouard  de : 

On  French  Liquidation  Commis- 
sion, 294 
Bonus,                                           51,  69-70 


94 

74-75 

75-78 

96 

206,  213 


149 


Boosters  and  Adapters,  186 

Bordeaux : 

As    port    of    embarkation    for 
A.  E.  F.,       11,  12,  16,  19-24,  25,  28 
Boston  : 

As  port  of  debarkation,  54 

Bound     Brook     Tetranitroaniline 

Plant,  182 

Boy  Scouts: 

Walnut  trees  hunted  by,  157 

Brashear  Co.,  J.  A.: 

Prisms     for    panoramic     sights 
produced  by,  191 

Brass,  277 

Brest : 

As  port  of  embarkation  for  A. 
E.  F.,  11,  12,  16,  17,  24-25,  29 

Briggs  &  Turivas : 

Senter  tetryl  plant  bought  by,      182 
Briggs,  Lieut.  Col.  M.  F. : 

On  Ordnance  Claims  Board,  147 

British  Army: 

Unidentified  dead  of,  84 

British  Government: 

American  claims  paid  by,  294 

American  surplus  aircraft  sold 
by,  213 

Ships      of,      withdrawn      from 
American  service,  31 

Britt,  Field  Clerk  James  A.: 

On  Stars  and  Stripes,  95 

Browns : 

Number  of,  in  Army,  70 

Bryant,  Waldo  C: 

Chief   of    Bridgeport   ordnance 
district,  148 

Buford,\].^.K.T.: 

Conversion  of,  35 

Bulk  Sale  of  A.  E.  F.  Property, 

309-312 

Bullard  Engineering  Works : 
Demobilization      of      ordnance 
work  at,  165-167 

Burr,  Maj.  Gen.  G.  W.: 

British  claims  settled  by,        303-304 
On     War    Department    Claims 
Board,  135 

Burr-Niemeyer  Agreement,        303-304 


INDEX 


325 


Bush  Terminal  Co.: 

Cartridge  cloth  sold  by, 


280 


264-266 


40 


54 
195 


282 


CAMPHOR,  285 

Camps,  Sale  of,  261-264 

Candles,  Toxic,  223-226 

Cantonments  : 

Purchase  of  sites  of, 
Cape  May,  V.S.  A.  C.T.: 

Loading  record  of. 
Cargo : 
Quantity  of  A.  E.  F.,  returned, 

42-43 
Cargo  Transports,  Conversion  of, 

32,  34-35 
Cartridge  Cloth,  278-280 

Castor  Bean  Case,  208-210 

Cemeteries,  American,  in  Europe, 

86-89 
Charleston : 

As  port  of  debarkation, 
Chateauroux  Tank  Plant, 
Chemical  Warfare  Service : 
Demobilization  activities  of, 

133,  220-227, 
Nitrogen    fixation    plant    built 
for, 
Chicago  Storage  Depot, 
Claims,  Soldiers', 
Classification  Board, 
Coffin,  Howard  E. : 

As  chairman  of  Aircraft  Board, 
Combat  Troops,  Embarkation  of, 
Commerce,  Secretary  of: 
War  contract  conference  called 
by,  117 

Construction  Division,  257-266 

Construction  Division   Claims 

Board,  260 

Construction  in  France,  214,  215 

Contract  Adjustment,  Board  of: 
Function,  124,  137 

Informal  contracts  settled  by, 

140-141 
Contractors,  Ordnance,  159-162 

Contract  Review,  Superior  Board 

of,  122-124 


184-185 

187 

70-73 

142 


204 
13 


Contracts : 
See     Cost-plus     Contracts     and 
War  Contracts 
Contracts  and  Adjustments,  Board 

of,  237 

Contracts,  Class  A,  140 

Contracts,  Class  B,  140 

Contracts,  Informal,      126-128,  139-141 
Contracts,  Surveyor  of,  121 

Copper,  274 

Cost-plus  Contracts, 

114-116,  117-121,  124-125 
Council  of  National  Defense, 

106-107,  248 
Cross-Channel  Cable,  A.  E.  F.,  229 
Cupro-nickel,  277-278 

Cuthell  Board,  288-296 

Cuthell,  Chester  W. : 
Activities   of,   in    settlement  of 

international  claims,  290-296 

Cuthell  Board  organized  by,        288 
Cuthell-Inverforth  Agreement, 

291,  293 
Czecho-Slovakia : 

Supplies  bought  by,  242 

Czecho-Slovak  Siberian  Troops, 

46  (footnote) 


D 


AILY  MAIL,  LONDON: 
Stars  and  Stripes  printed  in 


95 


plant  of, 
Dawes,  Brig.  Gen.  Charles  G. : 
On    United    States    Liquidation 
Commission,  296,  297 

Debarkation  Camps,  55-57 

Deceased  Soldiers'  Effects,  80-83 

Delano,  Col.  F.  A. : 
French    railroad    transportation 


claim  settled  by. 

308 

Delousing, 

17-19.  57 

Demobilization  Centers, 

49 

Demobilization  Problems,             3,  4-8 

Dent  Act, 

128,  140 

Diphenolchlorarsine, 

223-226 

Disability  in  Service, 

63  (footnote) 

Dodge  Brothers : 

Recuperator  plant  of. 

172-174 

Truck  contracts  with. 

232 

326 


INDEX 


Dorr,  G.  H.  : 

On     War    Department    Claims 
Board, 
Dravo,  Ralph  M.: 
Chief  of  Pittsburg  ordnance  dis- 
trict, 
Du  Pont  Powder  Co.: 
Claim  of, 
Dyes  manufactured  by, 


135 


150 

156 
182 


EARLY,   CAPT.   STEPHEN 
T.: 

On  Stars  and  Stripes, 
Eddystone  Rifle  Plant, 
Effects  Bureau, 
Embarkation  Camps,  A.  E.  F., 
Embarkation  Service  : 

Merged  in  Transportation  Serv- 
ice, 
Employment    Service,    United 


96 

196 

80-83 

16-17 


57 


States, 

106-108 

Engineer  Claims  Board, 

219 

Engineer  Department, 

50,  213. 

219,  281-282 

Engineering  Supplies, 

216-218 

Equipment,  Soldier's, 

21 

Erie  Howitzer  Plant, 

167,   171 

Erie  Proving  Ground, 

176 

Eustis,  Camp  Abraham, 

177 

Expeditionary  Bases,  Disposal  of. 

45-46,   258 

FINAL-PAYMENT  ROLLS,     66 
Finance,  Director  of: 

And  final  payment  to  officers,  67-69 

And  wounded  soldiers,  65-66 

Finance  Service,  64-69,   133,  266 

First  Censor  and  Press  Company,      96 
First  Division,  29,  59-62 

Fisher,  Harry  A. : 

On  Cuthell  Board,  294 

Fisher,  William: 

On  Cuthell  Board,  294 

Fixed  Nitrogen  Commission,     183,  185 
Food      Administration,      United 
States : 

Contract  settlements  of,  141 


195 
232 

228 


110 


Ford  Motor  Co.: 
Tank  contracts  with. 
Truck  contracts  with. 
Forest  Service : 

Supplies  turned  over  to. 
Forward     to     the     Farm!     Why 
Not? : 
In  reemployment  campaign, 
Frankford  Arsenal : 

Machinery  concentrated  at, 

181,   187,   191,    192,   198 
French  Claims,  306-308 

French  Government: 
American     supplies     purchased 
by,  190,  213,  216,  229,  230,  238-240, 
242,  245,  252,  281,  311-313 
Claims  negotiations  with, 

217,  295,  306-309 
French  Liquidation   Commission,     294 


GAS  DEFENSE  DIVISION,  220 
Gas,  Toxic,         220-222,  226-227 
General  Sales  Agent  and  Board, 

240,  241 
General  Vehicle  Co.: 

French  contract  with,  settled,       295 
Genicart,  Camp,  23 

German  Passenger  Ships,  35-36 

Goethals,  Maj.  Gen.  G.  W.: 
Purchase,   Storage,   and   Traffic 
Division  built  around,  234 

Graham,  Col.  J.  H. : 
A.   E.   F.   property   inventoried 
by,  309-310 

Grand    Central    Palace    Debarka- 
tion Hospital,  99 
Graves  Registration  Service,        85-91 
Great  Northern,  U.  S.  A.  T.,  39 
Greenhut    Building    Debarkation 

Hospital,  99 

Greenwood,  Levi  H. : 

Chief  of  Boston  ordnance  dis- 
trict, •  148 
Gun  Plants,                                   167-168 
Gwinn,  Ralph  W. : 
Work  of,  on  Cuthell  Board,  291,  292 


produced 

178,  179 


HARNESS, 
Harrisburg    Manufacturing 
&  Boiler  Co.: 
Railway       artillery 
after  armistice  by, 
Harrison,  C.  L. : 
Chief    of    Cincinnati    ordnance 
district, 
Hawley,  Private  Hudson : 

On  Stars  and  Stripes, 
Hidden-loss  Claim,  British, 
Hill,  Camp, 

Hines,  Brig.  Gen.  Frank  T.: 
As     chief     of     Transportation 

Service, 
Foreign    passenger    vessels    se- 
cured by. 
Plan    of,    for    repatriation 
A.  E.  F., 
Hoboken   Casual  Companies, 
Hollis,  Hon.  Henry  F.  : 
On    United    States    Liquidation 
Commission,  296,  297 

Hoover,  Herbert: 

Surplus  food  purchased  by,  241 


INDEX  327 

286       Inverforth,  Lord : 

Empowered  to  deal  with  Cuth- 
ell  Board,  290291 

Italian  Government: 
American  claims  paid  by,  295 


150 

95 

302-303 

55 


51 

5C- 

36 

of 

30-32 

56 


Horses  and  Mules, 
Horse  Shows  in  A. 
Hospital  Trains, 
Howe,  Richard  F. : 

On  Aircraft  Board, 
Humphreys,  Camp, 


244-246,  253-255 


E.  F., 


94 

99-100 

204 
268 


36 


IMPERATOR,^.^., 
Imperial  Munitions  Board : 
American   contracts    in    Canada 
settled  by,  140,  142,  148 

Informal  Contracts : 

See  Contracts,  Informal 
Inland  Traffic  Service,  57 

Interallied     Maritime     Transport 

Council,  36 

Interdepartmental  Conference,  117-121 
Interior,  Secretary  of : 

Army  lands  sold  by,  267 

Invalid  Contracts : 

See  Contracts,  Informal 
Inventory  and  Appraisal  of  A.  E. 

F.  Property,  309-311 


TACKLING,  D.  C: 
Nitro  powder  plant  contracts 
adjusted  by,  142-143 

Jadwin,  Brig.  Gen.  Edgar: 
A.  E.  F.  installations  appraised 
by,  310 

Jadwin  Report,  310 

Japan  Paper  Co.: 

Ordnance  claim  of,  158 

Johnson,  Homer  H. : 
On    United    States    Liquidation 
Commission,  296,  297 

Jones,  John  C. : 
Chief  of  Philadelphia  Ordnance 
district,  149 


K 


EUFFEL  &  ESSER: 
Optical  glass  produced  by, 

192-193 


LABOR,    DEPARTMENT 
OF: 

War     industry     terminated     on 
advice  of,  131,  132 

Lament,  Col.  R.  P. : 

On  Ordnance  Claims  Board,         147 
La  Pallice,  12 

Layton,  W.  T. : 

On  Inverforth  Commission,  291 

League  of  Nations,  318 

Leather,  286 

Le  Havre,  12 

Le  Mans : 

Embarkation  area  at, 

13-15,  23,  24,  28,  53-54 
Lewis,  Capt.  W.  Lee  : 

Lewisite  invented  by,  223 

Lewisite,  223,  226 

Liberty  Engine  Claim,  292,  293 


328  INDEX 

Liquidation    Commission,    United 
States : 
Claims  settled  by, 

217,  298-303,  304-305.  306-309 
Creation,  function,  and  policies 

of,  288-290,  296 

Property  sold  by,    210,  240,  309-3 13 
Loading  Plants,  188 

Lost  Baggage,  72,  75-77,  79-8o 

Lost  Baggage  Bureau,  75,  76-77.  78-79 
Loucheur,  M.  Louis: 
Refusal  of,  to  pay  Anglo-Ameri- 
can tank  claim,  300 
Lumber,  273 


MAHOGANY,  280 

Marion  Steam  Shovel  Co. : 

Railway       artillery       produced 
after  armistice  by,  178 

Marlin-Rockwell  Corp.: 

Ordnance  claim  of,  156 

Marseilles,  12 

Marshall,  Waldo  H. : 

On  Ordnance  Claims  Board,  147 

Maui,  U.  S.  A.  C.  T.,  39-40 

Maxwell-Chalmers  Co.: 

Tractors  produced  by,  194 

Mayor's  Committee  of  Welcome,       $5 
McClellan,  U.  S.  A.  T.,  25 

McLane  Silk  Co. : 

Cartridge  cloth  sold  by,  280 

Meade,  Camp,  62 

Medical  Department: 

Demobilization  activities  of, 

49,  61-64,  97-101 
Medical  Supplies,  232,  233 

Meigs,  Camp,  66 

Meloney,  Major  William  Brown: 

Reemployment  pamphlet  written 
by,  108 

Merritt,  Camp,  55-56 

Midvale  Steel  &  Ordnance  Co. : 

Howitzer  plant  of,  179-180 

Rifle  plant  of,  196 

"Mill"  at  Bordeaux,  19-23 

Mills,  Camp,  ss*  56 


Mines,  Bureau  of: 
Nitrogen  fixation  plant  built  by, 

184-185 
Mobile  Repair  Shops,  195 

Morel,  M.  Paul: 
A.  E.  F.  property  purchased  for 
France  by,  311-312 

Morgan  Engineering  Co. : 

Post-armistice      production      of 
railway  artillery  by,  178-179 

Motor  Transport  Corps,      49,  230-232 
Motor  Vehicles,  230-232 

Mules: 

See  Horses  and  Mules 
Muscle  Shoals  Nitrogen  Plant, 

183,  184,  185 


114 


NATIONAL     DEFENSE 
ACT, 

National  Defense,  Council  of, 

106-107,  248 
Navy  Department: 
Army  property  turned  over  to, 

180,  275 
Operation   of   troopships    relin- 
quished by, 
U.    S.   A.   T.  Northern  Pacific 

repaired  by, 
Warships  used  as  troopships  by, 
Nebraska  Aircraft  Corp.: 

Army  airplanes  bought  by. 
Nervous    and    Mental    Cases    in 

Army, 
Neuve,  Camp, 
Neville  Island  Gun  Plant, 
New  York : 

As  port  of  debarkation, 
New  York  Air  Brake  Co.: 

Ordnance  claims  of, 
Newport  News: 

Debarkation  at, 
Newport  News  Shipbuilding  Co.: 
Use      of,      by      Transportation 
Service,  34 

Nitrate  of  Soda,  274 

Nitrogen  Fixation  Plants,  183-185 

Nitro  Powder  Plant, 

142-143,  182,  262,  276 


33 

42 
36 

280 

102 

23 

180 

54 

156 


54,  99 


INDEX 


329 


Noble,  Frank  S.: 

Chief    of     Rochester    ordnance 
district, 
Northern  Pacific,  U.  S.  A.  T., 
Northwestern  Ordnance  Co.: 
Machinery     of,    transferred    to 
Erie  Howitzer  Plant, 


149 

42 


171 


OFFICERS: 
Final  payments  to,  67-69 

Transportation  of,  from  France, 

41-42 
Old  Hickory  Powder  Plant,  181 

Operations  Division,  259 

Optical  Glass,  192-194 

Optical  Instruments,  192 

Ordnance  Claims  Board,  146-147 

Ordnance  Contractors,  159-162 

Ordnance  Department: 

Demobilization  activities  of, 

133,  146,  147- J  59.  163,  164-165 
Ordnance  Industry,  145-146 

Ordnance  Plants,  276 

Ordnance  Salvage  Board,  275-280 

Otis  Elevator  Co.: 

Recuperator  plant  of,  173,  174 

PARKER,  EDWIN  B.: 
Chairman    of    United    States 
Liquidation  Commission,    296,  297 
Peirce,  Brig.  Gen.  W.  S. : 
Chief      of      Ordnance      Claims 
Board,  147 

Perryville  Ammonium  Nitrate 

Plant,  182 

Pershing,  Gen.  J.  J. : 
A.  E.  F.  disbanded  by,  12,  37 

Armistice  announced  by,  1 

Departure  of,  from  France,  29 

Parades  with  First  Division,    59-61 
Stars  and  Stripes  supported  by, 

95.  96-97 
"Pershing's  Own  Regiment,"  94 

Pershing  Stadium,  94,  215 

Physiotherapy,  100- 10 1 

Picatinny  Arsenal : 
Machinery  concentrated  at, 

181,  187.  188 
Picric  Acid  Plants,  182 


Pittsburg  Plate  Glass  Co. : 

Optical  glass  produced  by,     192-193 
Platinum,  277 

Polish  Relief  Corp.,  242 

Pontanezen,  Camp,  16-17 

Ports  of  Embarkation,  A.  E.  F., 

10-11,  12,  39 
Portugal : 

A.  E.  F.  supplies  bought  by,        242 
Post  Office  Department: 

Supplies  turned  over  to,  228 

Powder  Plants,  181,  182 

Preparedness : 

American  post-armistice  state  of,  319 
Public  Health  Service, 

101-102,  103-104,  252,  275 
Pullman  Car  Co. : 

Post-armistice      production      of 
railway  artillery  materiel  by,  179 
Purchase  Claims  Board,  247 

Purchase,  Director  of, 

133.  235.  246-248,  252-253 
Purchase,    Storage,    and    Traffic, 
Division  of: 
Industrial    demobilization    con- 
trolled by,  134-135 
Purchasing  functions  of,  219,  234-235 
War  contracts  controlled  by,        121 

QUARTERMASTER      D  E  - 
PARTMENT,  50,  234-235 

Quartermaster  Supplies : 
Demobilization  of  industry  pro- 


ducing. 

246-247 

Purchases  of,  in  Europe, 

235-236 

Sales  of: 

To  French  Government, 

238-240 

To  other  purchasers. 

240-243 

Storage  of. 

251-252 

Termination  of  European 

con- 

tracts  for. 

237 

Value  of  A.  E.  F.  surplus 

of,      243 

K 


ACINE    TRINITROTOL- 
UOL PLANT,  142 

Railroad    Administration,    United 
States : 
Cut  rates  to  discharged  soldiers 
granted  by,  51-52 


330  INDEX 

Railroad  Claim,  French,  217 

Railway     Passenger     Equipment, 


294 

267-268 


192 
172 


Army,  57-58 

Raritan  Arsenal,  176 

Raw  Materials  Division,  248 

Ray,  John  H.,  Jr.  : 

On  Cuthell  Board, 
Real  Estate  Service, 
Recording  &  Computing  Machines 
Co.: 
Optical     instruments    produced 
by, 
Recuperators, 
Reeves,  Col.  Ira  L. : 

President  of  Beaune  University,  93 
Remount  Service,  244-246,  253-255 
Reo  Motor  Co. : 

Tractors  produced  by,  194 

Ritchey,  Dr.  G.  W.: 

Optical  workers  trained  by,  191 

Roads,  Bureau  of  Public : 

Supplies  furnished  to,  217,  252,  282 
Roberts,  George  J.: 

Chief   of   New   York   ordnance 
district,  149 

Robinson,  Fred  J.: 

Chief  of  Detroit  ordnance  dis- 
trict, 149 
Rochester  Gun  Plant,         167,  170-171 
Rock  Island  Arsenal : 
Artillery  stored  at,  176 
Machinery  concentrated  at, 

172,  174-175.  197 
Post-armistice  production : 
Recuperators,  173 

36-ton  tanks,  195 

Roosevelt,  Theodore : 
Attitude    of,    toward   burial    of 
soldiers  in  France,  84 

Ross,  Private  Harold  W. : 

As  editor  of  Stars  and  Stripes,  96 
Roumania : 

Supplies  bought  by,  242 

Russell,  E.  A. : 

Chief  of  Chicago  ordnance  dis- 
trict, 149 
Russell,  Fort  D.  A.: 


Artillery  stored  at. 


176 


SALES  BRANCH,        269,  271-275 
Sales,  Director  of,       269-270,  276 
Salvage,  24,  243-244 

Savanna  Proving  Ground,  176 

School  System  of  A.  E.  F.,  92-93 

Scovil,  Samuel : 
Chief    of    Cleveland    ordnance 
district,  149 

Selective    Service    Men,    Entrain- 

ment  of,  l,  47-48 

Senter  Tetryl  Plant,  182 

Seventy-seventh  Division,  59,  67 

Sheffield  Nitrogen  Plant,  183-184,  185 
Shell : 
Demobilization  of  Industry  pro- 
ducing, 185-187 
Disposal  of  A.  E.  F.  stocks  of, 

188-190 
Shell,  Gas,  222-223 

Shelton,  Charles  B. : 

On  Cuthell  Board,  294 

Sights    and    Fire-control    Instru- 
ments, 190-193 
Signal  Corps,                                227-229 
Singer  Manufacturing  Co.: 

Post-armistice  production  of  re- 
cuperators by,  172,  173 
Singleton,  Marvin  E. : 
Chief  of  St.  Louis  ordnance  dis- 
trict, 150 
Small  Arms : 
Demobilization  of  industry  pro- 
ducing,                                   195-197 
Small-arms  Ammunition,            197-198 
Smith,  Dan: 
Reemployment    poster    painted 
by,  109 
Smith,  Sergeant  John  W.  Rixey : 

On  Stars  and  Stripes,  96 

Smiths : 

Number  of,  in  Army,  70 

Smoke,  Toxic,  223-226 

Soldier  Dead: 

Place  of  burial  of  remains  of, 

83-84,  91 
Spencer  Lens  Co. : 


Optical  glass  made  by. 


192 


INDEX 


331 


Springfield  Armory: 

Machinery  stored  at,  197 

Spruce  Production  Corp.,  143,  281 

Standard  B  Trucks,  231 

Standard  Contract  Provisions,  122-124 
Standards,  Bureau  of: 

Optical  glass  manufacture  by, 

192,  193-194 
Stars  and  Stripes,  9-10,  94-97 

Steel,  277 

Steever,  Miller  D. : 

Work  of,  on  Cuthell  Board, 

291,  292-293 
Stettinius,  Edward  R. : 

Activities  of,  in  settling  foreign 
industrial  claims,  297,  298,  305-306 
Stewart,  Col.  G.  H. : 

On  Ordnance  Claims  Board,  147 

St.  Nazaire : 

As    port    of    embarkation    for 
A.  E.  F.,  11,  12,  16,  25,  28 


Storage,  Director  of. 

Storage  Service, 

Stuart,  Camp, 

Sulphur, 

Surplus  Army  Supplies, 

Surplus  Property  Division, 

Symington-Anderson  Co. : 

Chicago    shell    factory    of,    r 
tained  as  stand-by  plant, 

Rochester  Gun  Plant  built  by. 


251 

250-252 

S5 
274 

270-271 
285-286 


187 

170 


301 
195 


311 


TANK  CLAIM,  BRITISH, 
Tanks, 
Tardieu,  M.  Andre : 

In  negotiations  leading  to  bulk 
purchase  of  A.  E.  F.  stocks, 
Thayer,  Harry  B. : 

On  Aircraft  Board,  204 

Theatrical  Performances,  Soldiers',    94 
Thirty-third  Division,  59 

Tires,  Automobile,  286 

Toluol  Plants,  182-183 

Training  Camps : 

Demobilization  of  troops  in,      48-50 
Use  of,  as  debarkation  camps,        $^ 


Transportation  Service : 
Air   service   squadrons   in   Eng- 
land repatriated  by,  38 
Cargo      transports      redelivered 

by.  43-45 

Conversion  of  cargo   transports 

by.  34-35 

Creation  of,  57 

First  Division  transported  by,  59-60 
German    passenger    vessels    se- 
cured by,  36 
Military  passengers  carried  by, 

after  armistice,  59 

Morale  of,  32-33,  38-39 

News  bureau  of,  ^^ 

Personnel  adjutants  of,  41 

Port  facilities  disposed  of  by,  45-46 
Pre-armistice    stoppage    of    em- 
barkation by,  37 
Reserve    of    troopships    created 

by,  45 

Russian    and    Siberian    expedi- 
tionary troops  repatriated  by, 

46  (footnote) 
Sick  and   wounded    transported 

by,  58-59 

Troopships  diverted  by,  54 

Troopships  operated  by,  33 

Transports,  43 

See  also  Cargo  Transports  and 
Troopships 
Travel  Allowance,  51 

Treasury,  Comptroller  of : 

Decision     of,     invalidating     in- 
formal contracts,  127 
Trinitrotoluol  Plants,  183 
Troop-movement  Section,               47-48 
Troopships,                    31,  34,  36-37,  45 
Trucks,  Motor,                              199,  286 
Tuberculosis,                                          102 
Tullytown  Bag-loading  Plant,          188 
Tuscania,  S.  S. : 
Identification   of  effects  of  sol- 
diers lost  in  sinking  of,           82-83 
Twenty-eighth  Division,  59 
Twenty-seventh  Division,                    59 


332  INDEX 

UNITED    STATES    AERO- 
NAUTICAL ENGINE 
PLANT,  207 
Universities,  Foreign : 

A.  E.  F.  soldiers  in,  93-94 

Upton,  Camp,  55,  56 


VESSEL  OWNERS : 
Demand   of,   for   redelivery 
of  chartered  tonnage,  33-34 

Veterans : 

Employment  campaign  for,   104-111 
Generosity  of  Government  to,      104 
Victory  Parades,  59 

Vocational      Education,      Federal 

Board  for,  101,  102-104 


WAH  CHANG  TRADING 
CORP.: 

Ordnance  claim  of,  158 

Wallgren,  Private  A.  B. : 

On  Stars  and  Stripes,  96 

Walnut  Timber,  156-157 

War  Camp  Community  Service : 

Reemployment  campaign  of,  109 

War  Contracts: 
Extent  of,  112-113,128-129 

Standardization  of,  122-124 

Termination  and  liquidation  of, 

129-132,  138 
See  also  Cost-plus  Contracts 
War  Credits  Board,  119-120  (footnote) 
War  Department: 

Contract  liquidation  system  of, 

135-136,  138 
Contractors  paid  in  advance  by, 

137-138,  141 
Contractual  obligations  of, 

112-113,  128-129 
Cost  of  wzr  to,  315-318 

Effect  of   1917  organization  of, 

upon  contracts,  116-117 

Expansion  of  plant  of,  256-257 

Policies  of: 
In  burying  soldier  dead,         83-84 
In  discharging  troops, 

49-51,  52-53,  105-106 


Real  Estate  Service  of,  266-267 

Reemployment  campaign  of,  104-105 
Reorganization  of,  in  1918,  121 

War  contracting  powers  of,  114 

War  Department  Claims  Board : 

Castor  bean  case  settled  by,  208-210 
Creation  and  personnel  of,  135 

Growth  of,  141 

Informal  contracts  settled  by,       140 
Record  of,  143-144 

War  Industries  Board: 
Australasian  wool  purchased  by,  248 


141 
248 

industry 

131.  132 

2-4 
132,  133-137 


Contracts  made  by. 

Function  of. 

Termination    of    war 
aided  by. 
War  Industry: 

Extent  of. 

Liquidation  of, 
Warner  &  Swasey : 

Panoramic  sights  produced  by,      191 
War  Risk  Insurance,  Bureau  of: 

Amalgamation    of,    with    other 
veterans'  bureaus,  103-104 

Disability  compensation  paid  by,    63 

Function  of,  101 

War,  Secretary  of: 

Order   of,   as    to   post-armistice 
production,  131 

Powers    under   Dent  Act   dele- 
gated by,  140 

War  Department  Claims  Board 
created  by,  135 

Watertown  Arsenal : 

Expansion  of,  168,  169-170,  174,  180 

Machinery  concentrated  at, 

178,  179.  180 
Watervliet  Arsenal : 

Expansion  of,  168-170,  174 

Machinery  concentrated  at,  180 

Watson,  Major  Mark: 

On  Stars  and  Stripes,  96 

Weems,  F.  C: 

On  Cuthell  Board,  291 

West  Indian  Laborers,  257 

Where  Do  We  Go  from  Here? : 

Booklet  used  in  reemployment 
campaign,  108-109 


INDEX 


333 


White  &  Co.,  J.  G.: 

Settlement    of    French    contract 
with, 
Willys-Overland,  Inc.: 

75-mm.  gun  carriages  produced 
by, 
Wilson,    Woodrow,    President   of 
the  United  States : 
And  Italian  delegates  to  Peace 
Conference, 
Winterich,  Corporal  John  T.: 

On  Stars  and  Stripes, 
Woods,  Col.  Arthur: 

Reemployment    campaign    con- 
ducted by. 
Wool  Administrator, 


295 


173 


290 


95 


107 
248 


Wool  Pool,  Liquidation  of,       248-250 


Woollcott,  Sergeant  Alexander: 

On  Stars  and  Stripes,  96 

World  War: 

Costs  and  benefits  of,  315-321 

Wounded  Soldiers : 

Payment  of,  65-66 

Transportation  of,  58-59 

Wright-Martin  Aircraft  Corp.: 

Engine  plant  of,  retained,  207 

OUNG     MEN'S     CHRIS- 
TIAN ASSOCIATION: 


Y 

Schools  of,  in  A.  E.  F., 

M  J  Zone     Finance      OfRcer     at 


INC, 

Zone      Finance 
Washington : 


Bonus  paid  by. 


93 

277 

69 


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